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East Asian Studies
Last Updated: 19-May-2015
This topic guide provides an introduction to find English language resources focusing on China, Japan, Korea, East Asia, and general Asia. These include both literature and primary source holdings housed at Green and other Stanford libraries or available electronically.
Books
You can find most books, including print and e-books, at Stanford in SearchWorks. You could search using title, keywords, subject terms, call number, series, or author.
This is a catalog that lets you search the collections of 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and regions. It is the world's largest network of library content and services.
This is a large-scale collaborative repository of digital content from over 60 partner research libraries including content digitized via the Google Books project and Internet Archive digitization initiatives, as well as content digitized locally by libraries. As of January 2012, HathiTrust comprises over 10 million volumes, over 2.7 million of which are public domain. HathiTrust provides a number of discovery and access services, notably, full-text search across the entire repository.
Journals & articles
This is a major source to start research on Asian studies. It provides citations to western-language periodical articles, chapters in edited volumes, conference proceedings, anthologies, Festschriften, etc. pertaining to east, southeast, and south Asia. It covers 1971 to the present, including full data from the print editions from 1971-1991.
Many databases in such disciplines as history, political science, and sociology have articles with Asian studies perspective, including:
A federal search engine that enables you to search many databases at a time. This specific search includes most databases that have resources on Asian studies.
A multidisciplinary database which provides full-text for over 4,650 scholarly publications. A great place to start your research.
This database provides access to the international literature in sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences.
Historical abstracts with full text
Covers the history of the world (excluding the United States and Canada) from 1450 to the present, including world history, military history, women's history, and history of education. Provides selective indexing of historical articles from more than 1,800 journals in over 40 languages back to 1955 as well as the full text of more than 300 journals and over 130 books.
Provides page images of back issues of the core scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and basic sciences from the earliest issues to within a few years of current publication. Users may browse by journal title or discipline, or may search the full-text or citations/abstracts. New issues of existing titles and new titles are added approximately on a weekly basis.
Features a collection of online scholarly journals that focuses on the humanities, social sciences, and mathematics.
Provides full-text documents from over 5,900 news, business, legal, medical, and reference publications.
A database that provides users with ready access to an extensive body of education-related literature.
MLA International Bibliography
A detailed bibliography of journal articles, books and dissertations covering literature, language and linguistics, folklore, literary theory & criticism, dramatic arts, as well as the historical aspects of printing and publishing.
Provides online access to an extensive collection of full-text articles from journals across a wide range of subject areas, including business, education, literature, political science, and psychology. User interface available in Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish.
Newspapers
LexisNexis, Access World News NewsBank, ProQuest Newsstand, and Factiva are major sources where you can search and access full-text stories published by English language newspapers/newswire in China, Japan and Korea dating back to 1980s or 1990s. Additionally, Stanford has a significant collection of newspapers housed at Newark and SAL3.
To find a specific newspaper title, go to SearchWorks, enter the title and click the option for "Newspaper" in the left column.
Stanford has access to following digital newspaper collections:
ProQuest Chinese Historical Newspaper Collection
Contains full text of various English-language Chinese newspapers published from 1832 to 1953. Important titles include The North China Herald, China Weekly Review, and Chinese Recorder. Content from certain titles are not yet completely loaded to the database, but most content will be loaded by later 2013 or early 2014.
ProQuest Historial Newspapers, South China Morning Post (1903-1995)
This historical newspaper provides genealogists, researchers and scholars with online, easily-searchable first-hand accounts and unparalleled coverge of the politics, society and events of the time.
The Japan Chronicle (1902-1940)
The English-language Japan Chronicle Weekly (1902-1940) is the newspaper of record for Japan's engagement with modernity and its emergence, through war, political and social upheaval and seismic social change in East Asia, onto the world stage in the first half of the 20th century. Historians of East Asia have long seen it as an uniquely valuable, well-informed, controversial but always readable resource.
Database of digitized issues of the Japan Times, The Japan Advertiser, The Japan Times & Mail, The Japan Times and Advertiser, Japan Times & Advertiser, Japan Times Advertiser, Nippon Times; includes all issues from March 22, 1897 to December 31, 2013.
Following are links to major English language newspapers in China, Japan and Korea:
Dissertations and theses
This database provides full-text access to most Stanford dissertations written between 1989-2009. Stanford dissertations (including those written after 2009) are also available from a link in the Searchworks record for individual dissertations.
ProQuest dissertations and theses global
Searchable and browsable database of dissertations and theses from around the world, spanning from 1743 to the present day. It also offers full text for graduate works added since 1997, along with selected full text for works written prior to 1997.
NDLTD is an international organization that, through leadership and innovation, promotes the adoption, creation, use, dissemination and preservation of electronic theses and dissertations. The NDLTD encourages and supports the efforts of institutes of higher education and their communities to develop electronic publishing and digital libraries (including repositories), thus enabling them to share knowledge more effectively in order to unlock the potential benefits worldwide.
Statistics
This is a major primary source to conduct research on contemporary China. It is a comprehensive database web site focusing on economic statistics of China, arranged by regions and categories. It includes monthly and yearly reports on China's macroeconomic development, statistical databases about China's population and economy at the county and city level, and financial indicators of more than 568 industrial branches. It also includes statistical yearbooks, census data, industrial and marketing surveys, and an atlas of China.
Statistical time series for countries from around the world covering a wide range of economic and socio-demographic topics. Descriptions of the international sources and definitions used in compiling the data are included. Includes Indicator databases (Key Global Indicators, Millennium Development Goals, Gender Info, Indicators on Women and Men, The State of the World’s Children 2008, ECE Database), UNESCO UIS Data, ILO Data, Energy Statistics, Greenhouse Gas Inventory, FAO Data, WHO Data, Human Development Report, Industrial Commodity Statistics, ITU Data, Official Country Data, Estimates of Main Aggregates, Demographic Statistics, World Population Prospects, UNHCR Statistical Yearbook, Commodity Trade Statistics, UNWTO Data, with more databases to be added.
OECD iLibrary contains all the publications and datasets released by OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), International Energy Agency (IEA), Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA), OECD Development Centre, PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), and International Transport Forum (ITF) since 1998.
Collection of data and statistics from official statistical systems organized and financed by national governments.
Provides statistical data from U.S. government publications from 1973, state and private sources from 1980, and international organizations from 1983.
Provides access to statistics ans studies gathered by market researchers, trade organizations, scientific publications, and government sources on over 600 industries.
National Bureau of Statistics of China
Hong Kong Statistics, Census and Statistics Department, Hong Kong Special Administration Region
Statistics and Census Service, Macao SAR Government
Government Statistics, National Central Library, Taiwan
Korean Statistical Information Service
Primary Resources
China: Trade, Politics and Culture 1793-1980
Based on substantial collections of unique manuscript materials held at the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and the British Library in London, this resource provides a wide variety of original source material detailing China’s interaction with the West from Macartney’s first Embassy to China in 1793, through to the Nixon/Heath visits to China in 1972-74.
Chinese Civilization in Time and Space
Web-based GIS system with historical maps, integrated with full-text databases from the Academia Sinica. The fundamental base maps are based on Dr. Tan's "The Historical Atlas of China". "The Historical Atlas of China" provides users with Chinese historical features, covering Chinese history over the past 2000 years, from the ancient time to Qing dynasty. Click on "Enter CCTS System" to access the database. Users must download ArcView 9.1, the latest Java Runtime Environment, and CCTS plug-ins before use
Foreign Office Files for China [1919-1980]
This collection makes available the complete British Foreign Office files dealing with China, Hong Kong and Taiwan from 1919 to 1980. The highly varied documents include government memoranda, official correspondence, newspaper cuttings, maps, reports, profiles, economic statistics, records of court cases, eye-witness accounts, etc. Published in six sections, access to sections 1919-1929 and 1940-1980 is currently available. Content from 1930-1948 will be accessed as soon as the resource is released.
Chinese Foreign Policy Database
This online resource contains nearly 1,500 declassified documents on the international relations of the People's Republic of China since 1949. Freely-accessible from the Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program, the database includes diplomatic cables, high level correspondence, meeting minutes and other internal documents retrieved from dozens of archives around the world, the vast majority available with English translation.
In Microformat
Confidential U.S. State Department central files, China
Records of the U.S. Department of State relating to the internal affairs of China
Records of the United States legation in China, 1843-1945
British intelligence on China in Tibet, 1903-1950
To find more primary sources in Microformat or print, go to SearchWorks, enter your keywords and click the option for "Microformat" or "Book" in the left column.
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