What is IBSS? IBSS (International Bibliography of the Social Sciences) provides details of articles and books from across thousands of publications. Many (but not all) of the journals indexed by IBSS are peer-reviewed. IBSS provides an option for limiting your results to those from peer-reviewed literature.
Subject coverage: A broad range of social sciences are covered including social policy analysis, sociology, anthropology and economics. In addition to considering IBSS, we recommend that you take a look at the databases recommended in the Library's webpages for your subject. To find these, click the relevant subject in the right-hand column of the Library Homepage. For example, the Scopus database also provides strong coverage of social science topics.
Date coverage: IBSS indexes content from 1951 onwards.
Connecting to IBSS
To connect to IBSS: click either the IBSS link in the Library Catalogue or one of the IBSS links in the Library's 'resources for your subject' webpages (connect to these webpages via the list of subjects on the Library Homepage). Here is another link:
Journal articles and books relating to anthropology, economics, political science and sociology - coverage from 1951 onwards.
Off-campus students and staff: after clicking an IBSS link, you will be asked to enter your University of Bath username and password (unless you are connecting via VPN/UniDesk).
Checking the availability of an article/document
As with most library databases, IBSS provides abstracts/summaries of articles and other documents. The availability of the full document depends on whether the Library has bought the content, and whilst we provide an extensive collection of literature, there will be some gaps in coverage.
To check the availability of a document referenced in a search result: if you don't see a direct link, click the blue and white 'links' button. This takes you into the Library Catalogue where you will either find a link to the full document or a statement explaining that the content is unavailable.
If the full document isn't available: if you're signed in to the Library Catalogue, you'll see a link inviting you to request a scan of the document from another library. Click this link to complete a request form. There's a good chance that you'll then receive the scan, either the same day or within two working days: further information about the Inter-Library Loan service.
