Getting Started
This guide provides a list of major library resources for the study of philosophy at UC Davis.
Key Resources
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Philosopher's Index This link opens in a new windowThe Philosopher's Index is a comprehensive, bibliographic database covering worldwide research in all areas of philosophy. It is created by philosophers for philosophers. The Philosopher's Index features: the inclusion of documents from philosophy and interdisciplinary publications, extensive indexing, and author-written abstracts. Philosophers prescreen potential source documents for relevance to the field of philosophy; this enables the inclusion of articles from interdisciplinary journals and contributions from interdisciplinary anthologies that pertain to philosophy. The indexing includes the assignment of subject headings that encompass proper names and subject terms using a standardized thesaurus. The indexing improves the quality of search results and the use of the standardized thesaurus provides consistency across records from the various publications. The abstracts help the user more quickly ascertain the relevance of the documents. The database provides global coverage, with source publications from more than 135 countries, and has records from 1940 to present, with additional records dating back to 1902. It includes more than 530,000 records in 37 languages. Sources includes: journals (print and e-journal articles from more than 1600 philosophy and interdisciplinary journals); books/monographs, including encyclopedias, dictionaries and book series; anthologies; contributions to anthologies from philosophy and interdisciplinary anthologies; and book reviews.
[Coverage: 1940-present] -
PhilPapers This link opens in a new windowAs of 1/1/2026, the Library is no longer able to subscribe to PhilPapers.
This is due to 2025/2026 Library budget reductions.
PhilPapers uses advanced trawling techniques, along with wide-ranging crowd-sourcing, to monitor all sources of research content in philosophy. Includes journals, books, personal pages, and open access archives. Our index currently includes 1,112,068 research books and articles. Over 5,000 individuals have contributed content to our index. -
L'Année Philologique: Bibliography of the Classical World This link opens in a new windowThis is the major bibliographic index for Classical studies, including art, history, philosophy, literature and more. Use the hard copy edition of the Annee Philologique to search for material published before 1949. It is located at Shields Library Humanities/Social Sciences Reference Z7016.A1 A5
[Coverage: 1949-current]
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Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyDesigned as a dynamic reference work, this continuously updated encyclopedia features entries maintained and updated by an expert or group of experts in the field. All entries and updates are refereed by the members of an Editorial Board before they are made public. For citation, fixed editions are made on a quarterly basis and stored archivally.
Note: Open (unrestricted public) access to the Encyclopedia has been made possible, in part, with a financial contribution from the University of California Libraries.