History

Primo contains details of all the online and print materials available in the Library, and is the first place to begin searching for any academic materials that you may need to research, write and submit essays, assignments or dissertations.

You can access and search Primo online.

Consult our Primo Library Guides for more details on how to search this vital resource.

The University of Aberdeen subscribes to many important online collections, often called Academic Databases. These can contain different types of material, such as ebooks, journal articles, conference papers, newspapers and others. The material they contain is scholarly, of a high standard, and the kind of content you will need to engage with when preparing essays, assignments and dissertations. 

The databases below contain content relevant to History. The links below will take you to their entries in Primo, from which you will be able to access the sites themselves. You can also see details for all of our academic databases, across all subject areas, in Primo Find Databases.

Web of Science
A very important collection that you should use. Contains millions of records covering arts & humanities, including scholarly articles, book and other reviews, editorials, letters and biographical items. If WoS does not contain the material itself there will be a link that searches to see where else you might be able to access it.

Early English Books Online
This collection aims to make available every edition of every book ever published in the United Kingdom from 1475-1700.

JSTOR
A key resource across many arts and humanities disciplines, JSTOR is particularly useful for accessing older content, but also contains current scholarly materials or links to other possible locations.

LION: Literature Online
THE database for literature. Contains literature from the Seventh Century to the present day. Contains 350,000 plays, poems, prose. 400 journals in full text, reference works and evaluated web links.

Cambridge Core
High quality academic books and journals, including many history materials, this collection is from Cambridge University Press. We do not have access to everything in this collection but it is still worth searching or browsing.

Ebook Central
This full text collection contains more than 220,000 authoritative books and maps supplied by over 180 leading scholarly publishers, including works on History, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, and many arts and humanities subjects. A really important collection that covers almost all subjects taught and researched at the University of Aberdeen.

Other academic databases worth looking at via Primo include the International Medieval Bibliography and the Bibliography of British & Irish History.

There are many academic journals publishing articles that focus on History, amongst other subjects. This list below will take you to some of their entries in Primo from which you will be able to search or browse them online. You can search in Primo's Journal Search to find details of all our journals, online and in print.

American Historical Review

The Journal of British Studies

The Journal of Economic History

Journal of Global History

Past & Present

While we have many online books covering History we also have a range of print titles that will be useful when studying or researching in this area. You can search in Primo for these titles, but here are a few of the physical locations, or shelfmarks, in the Sir Duncan Rice Library where you can browse the shelves and find relevant literature.

Correct and accurate referencing is a fundamental part of producing any piece of academic work, whether that is an assignment, an essay, a dissertation, a journal article or a book.

We have some excellent guidance on this available in our collection of Referencing Library Guides.

You will also find guidance on that page about a very useful piece of software called RefWorks. RefWorks is web-based reference management software that allows you to import and save references from online academic databases and other sources. You can then use these references when writing any piece of academic work, as RefWorks helps with formatting them in the correct referencing style.