Primary sources are produced by participants or direct observers of an issue, event or time period. These sources may be recorded during the event or later on, by a participant reflecting upon the event. In some cases, it will be difficult to obtain the original source, so you may have to rely on copies (photocopies, microfilm, digital copies). Copies or transcriptions of a primary source still count as a primary source.
Some examples of primary sources include:
To find primary sources in the following databases, you may have to refine your search by date (e.g., by limiting search results to a date range of interest, such as 1800-1850), or limit your results to formats of particular interest (such as newspapers). For further guidance, please consider the points in this LibGuide from Princeton.
Unlimited users.
Covers United States and Canadian history and culture from prehistory to present, and includes indexing of over 1800 scholarly journals and magazines.
Unlimited users.
Updated daily. Contains periodicals published between 1740 and 1940, including special interest and general magazines, literary and professional journals, children's and women's magazines and many other historically-significant periodicals.
Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. Contains citations and abstracts of worldwide literature (excluding the United States and Canada) from approximately 2,100 journals and (since 1980) books and dissertations on political, diplomatic, economic, social, cultural and intellectual history and related areas of the social sciences and humanities. Covers history dating from 1450 to the present. The database corresponds to the print Historical Abstracts, which was produced by ABC-CLIO.
Unlimited users.
Updated annually. A major archive that makes the backfiles of periodicals in the humanities and social sciences available electronically, providing access to the full text of a growing number of digitized periodicals that have been indexed in its sister database, Periodicals Index Online. Contains over 700 journals comprising more than 3 million articles and 15 million article pages. The scope is international and multi-disciplinary, including journals in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and other Western languages.
Print indexes can help you find older medical articles:
Before online PubMed came into existence, there were print medical journal article indexes. Here is a brief history:
These indexes may be found in print and digital format in the following collections:
The UT Libraries has historical back issues of several medical journals, including:
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders is a publication produced by the American Psychiatric Association, primarily intended to be used by mental health practitioners to diagnosis and treat mental disorders. Historically, it has been controversial and problematic, and at times, used in harmful ways against marginalized groups. Older editions of the DSM are potentially useful to scholars in Health Humanities as primary sources.
DSM-II 6th Printing Change
DSM-III-R Casebook: A Learning Companion to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
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