Indexes over 2,600 social sciences journals and 6,000 books each year. Coverage includes the core disciplines of anthropology, economics, political science and sociology, and reflects the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of the social sciences. The coverage is from 1951-present. Available through any University of Alabama Internet connection. Also available from any location to user with valid UA identification number.
IBOSS will connect automatically by choosing it from the database selection page which can be found by selecting Databases at the University Libraries homepage at http://www.lib.ua.edu/
To begin a search on IBOSS enter keywords in the entry box. The words do NOT have to be in quotations. If you need help choosing search terms or related terms be sure to use Suggest. This will help you with more precise terminology and will return you better results. Your search terms can be searched for in various places within an article. You can set the search limits to search for words: anywhere, in subject, in title, or in the author field. You can change other limits as well such as selecting a range of publication years that you want to search within, language of publication, or even strictly within a discipline such as economics by choosing the subset located with Change Limits. Using Advanced Search allows for greater precision by using such capabilities as Boolean connectors and many other search functions.
You can change the time period of the databases in which you are searching by clicking on the drop down menu that reads, "View databases being searched."
You can enlarge the display screen size by clicking on the up/down toggle switch beside the "Change Display" option.
Once your search results are retrieved you can print the records out, save them to disk or email them to your account. Note: these are not the full-text of the sources only a bibliography-you must acquire the source in one of our full-text databases or through the hardcopy in periodicals if we subscribe to the source. Please see Check for Holdings to determine if the source is available in the University Library.
Click Logout in the upper right part of the screen.