Research Services | Appointments

Librarians are available for research appointments or other assistance in person, via Zoom or email at librarydc@jh.edu. There are three librarians onsite at Frary Library in the Hopkins Bloomberg Center (D.C.), with additional support from librarians located at the Baltimore campuses.

Research Guides

Among the SAIS research guides is the core multi-topic Key Resources for International Relations, as well topical guides for primary source research and data sources. Librarians can help you identify archives, special collections, etc.

Data Services

The Sheridan Libraries Data Services team provides support with data requests, access to GIS software and geospatial data, as well as other data visualization tools.

Data Services also offers a JH Libraries Data Grant. Award amounts vary depending on need, data cost, availability of funds, and perceived usefulness of the dataset for Johns Hopkins at large. Note that grant applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.

Journal and Article Impact Evaluation

The Scholarly Metrics Guide is your starting point. Within that guide...

Find Journal Metrics offers tools that gather statistics such as the number of articles published per year and the number of citations citing that journal each year. The resources can also give you the journals' overall impact within a field.

Article Metrics is also known as Citation Tracking or Analysis. See the box called "Article Citation Counts" for tools that track the number of times an article has been cited in journal that tool indexes.

Alerting Services

Doctoral students often need to track new publications in their area of research. Alerting services can automatically notify you of new articles.

Many of our big article databases (such as ProQuest, EBSCOhost and Scopus) offer this, usually listed as "Alert" options in the search results pages. In many cases, you do not need to create an individual account (within the database) to get these alerts.

Finding Dissertations | Theses

SAIS Ph.D. dissertations are listed in Catalyst. From this pre-limited search, you can also click on Advanced Search to add in additional terms or use the sorting options on the left side of the results screen.

SAIS D.I.A. theses are listed in Jscholarship. From this pre-limited search, you can refine your results with the filters on the left or add more terms to the search box.

For dissertations from other universities, ProQuest Dissertations and Theses can help you access specific titles (some with full text PDF). Google Scholar also has some dissertations. Please contact a librarian for more help.

See Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) for JHU's submission guidelines.

Library of Congress

The Library of Congress (LC) is one of the world's largest libraries. It is most useful as a supplement to research begun at the Hopkins Libraries. Details on accessing and using LC.

Note that Library of Congress area studies librarians are scholars in their respective areas. Covering Africa and the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and Hispanic cultures, they can serve as a vital resources for difficult-to-find materials. LC also also has other specialized collections with unique support for researchers.