There are a number of resources that may be especially helpful to doctoral students. Most importantly, the Hopkins Librarians in D.C. can help SAIS students with doctoral research. Contact them at librarydc@jh.edu.

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.

Most of our big article databases (such as ProQuest, EBSCO 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 SAIS Dissertations and Theses

As of Fall 2023, the DC Librarians are working on ways to find SAIS dissertations and theses in the recently upgraded Catalyst and JScholarship. In those tools, you need to have a title or author already identified. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses can help you access specific tiles, as well as Google Scholar. Please contact a librarian for more help.

Research Guides

Among the SAIS research guides, are topical guides for Primary Source Research in International Relations and Data Sources for International Relations. Librarians can help you identify archives, special collections, etc. Hopkins' Sheridan Libraries has a Data Services team that provides support with data requests, use of GIS and geospatial data and other data visualization tools

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. See this page for details on accessing and using LC.

Note that LC area studies librarians are scholars in their respective areas and can serve as a vital resources for difficult-to-find materials. LC also also has other specialized collections with unique support for researchers.