Research Guides: Sociology: Reviews of Research

Reviews of Research

Review materials are a good way to familiarize yourself with trends and key ideas in current sociology. These are usually annual or monthly cumulations of articles that give you a brief summary of research and findings on a particular topic. Annual Reviews is one of the foremost publishers of review articles. You can search all Annual Reviews publications at once, or just search an individual discipline-specific journal title.

Annual Reviews This link opens in a new window
Annual Reviews offers comprehensive, timely collections of critical reviews written by leading scientists. Annual Reviews volumes are published each year for 29 focused disciplines within the Biomedical, Physical, and Social Sciences.

Annual Review of Sociology
1975 to date. Articles cover significant developments in the field of sociology, including major theoretical and methodological developments as well as current research in the major subfields. Review chapters typically cover social processes, institutions and culture, organizations, political and economic sociology, stratification, demography, urban sociology, social policy, historical sociology, and major developments in sociology in other regions of the world. Annual Reviews also publishes other journals in the related fields of Political Science, Anthropology, Public Health, Economics, and Psychology.
Annual Review of Criminology
2018 to date. Covers significant developments in the multidisciplinary field of criminology, defined as the study of both the nature of criminal behavior and societal reactions to crime.
Annual Review of Law and Social Science
2005 to date. Strives to enhance the understanding of the complex connections between law, culture, social structure, and society by focusing on social scientific studies of law and law-like systems of rules, institutions, processes, and behaviors.
Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application
2014 to date. Aims to inform statisticians, and users of statistics more broadly, about major methodological advances and the computational tools that allow for their implementation.
Sociology Compass
2007 to date. Publishes state-of-the-art reviews that survey current research from across the discipline, supported by a comprehensive bibliography and accessible to an international readership.

Book Reviews

Book Review Digest Plus (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window
Indexes reviews of current fiction and non-fiction, and provides review excerpts and over 100,000 full text reviews. The database includes children’s books as well as books for adults and young adults. Dates of coverage: 1983 to present.

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews
1972 to date. Approximately 50-60 English-language books in sociology and related disciplines are reviewed in each issue. Significant works are analyzed at greater length in review essays.
Sociology: Reviews of New Books
1973-1983. Print source for book reviews in sociology.
Social Pathology: A Journal of Reviews
1995 to 2000. Featured review essays and book reviews of scholarly works in the areas of social problems, deviance, criminology, and social control.

Reference Materials and Bibliographies

Encyclopedias and bibliographies review the state of research in an area or on a topic and refer you to additional sources. Encyclopedia entries often have a list of works cited at the end that point you to relevant readings while bibliographies list foundational citations on a given topic.

Oxford Bibliographies This link opens in a new window
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Oxford Bibliographies presents constantly updated articles that contain citations (with annotations) and commentaries for sources across the disciplines. Users can search topics and gather relevant journal article and book citations, online resources, data sources, and more.
Credo Reference This link opens in a new window
Online collection of dictionaries, encyclopedias, biographical sources, quotations, bilingual dictionaries, and measurement conversions covering topics from the arts, sciences, and social sciences.
SAGE Knowledge This link opens in a new window
A searchable collection of more than 833 eBooks and eReferences on sociological topics, including scholarly monographs, reference works, handbooks, and more. From the landing page, browse by subject by selecting Sociology, or simply search for keywords and concepts using the search box.
SAGE Research Methods Online This link opens in a new window
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SAGE Research Methods Online aggregates materials from SAGE's journal and reference content, including dictionaries, datasets, case studies, and books. Researchers can explore methods with the Methods Map tool and gather context (including sample data sets) to help design research projects, understand particular methods or identify a new method, conduct research, and write up findings.
Gale eBooks (formerly Gale Virtual Reference Library) This link opens in a new window
Search across a range of encyclopedias, dictionaries, and more in science, the science sciences, and the humanities humanities.

International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Science
Represents the first attempt in a generation to describe the state of the art in all the fields encompassed within the social and behavioral sciences.
Required Reading: Sociology's Most Influential Books by Dan Clawson
This book contains essays on some of the most widely-read sociological studies, including Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions, Tilly's From Mobilization to Revolution, Foucault's Discipline and Punish, Murray's Losing Ground, Geertz's Interpretation of Cultures, Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice, Kanter's Men and Women of the Corporation, and Wilson's The Declining Significance of Race, among others.