New York University | Bobst Library: East Asian Studies

Research Assistance

East Asian Studies

The purpose of this guide is to provide undergraduate and beginning graduate students with a starting point for finding materials related to East Asia.

Librarian for East Asian Studies
NYU Links
Related Guides
Research Assistance
Internet Links
Books
Articles
Encyclopedias
Dictionaries
Dissertations
Primary Text Collections
Newspapers
Economic and Statistical Sources

Librarian for East Asian Studies

Dawn Lawson
Librarian for East Asian Studies
New York University
Bobst Library, Lower Level 1
70 Washington Square South
New York, NY 10012
Phone: (212) 998-2437
E-mail: dawn.lawson@nyu.edu
Web: http://homepages.nyu.edu/~dl80

NYU Links

Related Subject Guides

Research Assistance

Internet Links

Association for Asian Studies
The web site of the scholarly professional association open to all persons interested in Asia.
Bibliography of Asian Studies
This electronic resource provides citations to Western-language periodical articles, chapters in edited volumes, conference proceedings, anthologies, Festschriften, etc. pertaining to Asia published from 1971 to the present.
Columbia University's C. V. Starr East Asian Library
This page contains links to Columbia's online catalog and its East Asia related departments, as well as many other valuable resources in the field.
Council on East Asian Libraries (CEAL)
Provides access to the library catalogs of CEAL member libraries and offers excellent subject guides.
East Asia WWW Virtual Library
This page contains links to individual virtual libraries focusing on each country in the region.
H-ASIA
H-ASIA is a member of H-Net Humanities & Social Sciences OnLine. The primary purpose of H-ASIA is to enable historians and other Asia scholars to easily communicate current research and teaching interests.

Books

Searching by Subject

To find books on East Asian subjects when the author and title are unknown, do a subject search in BobCat, which categorizes books using the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). The four-volume set of books that lists all LCSH can be found in all three of Bobst's reference areas; you can also search for LCSH online.

A subject heading usually consists of a main subject followed by various subdivisions. Often the main subject is a geographic subject, as in

China -- Civilization -- 1644-1912
Japan -- History -- 1912-1945
Korea -- Social conditions -- 1392-1910

But the main subject can also be a generic subject term, which is then followed by a geographic subdivision, as in

Architecture -- China -- to 618
Women authors -- Japanese -- Heian period 794-1185
Sculpture -- Korea -- Koryo period, 935-1392

The Committee on Technical Processing of the Council on East Asian Libraries has compiled very useful lists (from their home page, select Cataloging Reference Resources; the lists are at the bottom of the page) of the LCSH related to the study of each country in the region.

Searching by Author or Title

If you know the author or title of the item you are searching, it may include or be entirely made up of words that have been romanized from an East Asian language. In that case, it is important to know the Library of Congress romanization system for the language. For Chinese, the Library follows the principles of the pinyin system. Except for proper nouns, there is a space between the romanized form of every character. Omitting spaces can affect your search results! For example, the title of Liu Dajie's book on the development of the history of Chinese literature is romanized as Zhongguo wen xue fa zhan shi, so a keyword search on "wenxue" spelled without a space when you are looking for this and other books on literature in Chinese will not get any results. You must search for "wen xue." For Japanese, the modified Hepburn system is used. For Korean, the McCune-Reischauer system is used.

If the book you are seeking is not found in Bobcat, use the other catalogs page of the library home page to search in OCLC WorldCat (WorldCat can be searched in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean script), which is a combined catalog of many libraries throughout the United States and elsewhere in the world. Books you find in these catalogs can be obtained via interlibrary loan. In addition, NYU participates in the Global ILL Framework, which makes it possible to borrow books from libraries in Japan, even if they are not found in OCLC.

Links to Online Catalogs in East Asia

China: National Library of China
Japan: National Diet Library Catalog; NACSIS Webcat (the National Institute of Informatics' union catalog)
Korea: National Library of Korea
Taiwan: National Central Library

Articles

For articles in Western languages on East Asian topics, a useful starting point is the Bibliography of Asian Studies. This electronic resource provides citations to Western-language periodical articles, chapters in edited volumes, conference proceedings, anthologies, and other types of publications pertaining to Asia published from 1971 to the present. When you find a citation to an article in this bibliography for which you would like to obtain the full text, search for the periodical title in Bobst's list of electronic journals and/or in Bobcat. Also use Bobcat to search for the book containing the chapter or article cited.

Although not specifically dedicated to East Asian studies, many general-purpose databases provide citations to and often even the full-text of articles relating to the field, including

NYU maintains subscriptions to numerous print journals in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Current issues are located in the Current Periodicals room on the third floor of Bobst; bound volumes are shelved in the stacks according to the call number for the periodical listed in Bobcat.

The full text of articles in Chinese (and some in English) from nearly 2,000 Chinese humanities and social science periodicals is available via China Academic Journals. Additional journal articles in Chinese can be found in Ren da bao kan zi liao.

For online citations to articles in Japanese, consult Magazine Plus, which indexes the contents of some 14,000 periodicals published in Japan after World War II and more than 6,000 volumes of collected works. Indexed periodical titles include scholarly periodicals from the National Diet Library's Zasshi kiji sakuin from 1975 to the present and popular magazines (monthlies and weeklies including sports and hobbies) indexed in Janaru indekkesu from 1981 to the present. Specific articles can be obtained through the Global ILL Framework; ask the East Asian Studies librarian, sendMail('dl80'); , for assistance.

Consult KISS for the full-text of more than 800,000 Korean-language articles published in Korean scholarly journals and university publications since 1945 on a wide range of topics. Additional journal articles in Korean on contemporary Korean history are available from Korea Content Lab.

Encyclopedias

Cambridge Encyclopedia of China. Cambridge [England]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Bobst REF1 DS705 .C35 1991
Encyclopaedia of Asian Civilizations. Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1987. Bobst REF1 DS4 .L68 1987
Encyclopedia of China. New York: Facts on File, 1999. Bobst REF1 DS705 .P47 1999
Encyclopedia Japonica. Tokyo: Shogakukan, 1967-1972. Bobst REF1 PL511 .E45n
Encyclopedia of Modern Asia. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2002. Bobst REF1 DS4 .E53 2002
Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan. Tokyo: Kodansha, 2002.

Dictionaries

Electronic

Print

Grand dictionnaire Ricci de la langue chinoise. Paris: Institut Ricci, 2001. Bobst REF1 PL1459.F8 I677 2001
Han yu da ci dian. Shanghai: Han yu da ci dian chu ban she, 2001. Bobst REF1 PL1420 .H3495 2001
Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English Dictionary. Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1974. Bobst REF1 PL679 .K4 1974
Kojien. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1998. Bobst REF1 PL675 .S49 1998
A Korean-English Dictionary. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967. Bobst REF1 PL937.E5 M3
New Advanced English-Chinese Dictionary. Beijing: Shang wu yin shu guan guo ji you xian gong si, 2003. Bobst REF1 PL1455 .Z85 2003
Nihon Kokugo Daijiten. Tokyo: Shogakkan, 2000-2002. Bobst REF1 PL675 .N462 2000
Sae uri mal k'un sajon. Soul T'ukpyolsi : Soul sinmunsa, 1974. Bobst REF1 PL935 .S33 1974

Dissertations

See Doctoral Dissertations for general information.

Electronic

Online access to citations for dissertations published in North America and Europe from 1861 to the present is available from ProQuest Digital Dissertations; abstracts are available for dissertations published since 1986, and full-text is available for some dissertations.

Print

Doctoral dissertations on Asia. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Association for Asian Studies, 1975-1993. Bobst REF1 Z3001 .D63
Doctoral dissertations on China: A bibliography of studies in Western languages, 1945-1970. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1972. Bobst Z3106 .G65
Doctoral dissertations on China, 1971-1975: A bibliography of studies in Western languages. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978. Bobst Z3106 .G65 Suppl
Doctoral dissertations on Hong Kong, 1900-1997: An annotated bibliography with an appendix of dissertations completed in 1998 and 1999. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2001. Bobst Z3107.H7 S59 2001
Doctoral dissertations on Japan and on Korea, 1969-1979: An annotated bibliography of studies in Western languages. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982. Bobst Z3306.S54 Suppl. 2
Japan and Korea: An annotated bibliography of doctoral dissertations in Western languages, 1877-1969. Chicago: American Library Association, 1970. Bobst Z3306.S54

Primary Text Collections

Chinese

NYU subscribes to the Si ku quan shu, which provides full-text access to 3,600 volumes of traditional Chinese literature.
Substantial free sources of Chinese texts include Taiwan's Academia Sinica and Beijing University's Classics Corpora.

Japanese

Denshi Toshokan: A comprehensive, frequently updated collection of links to Japanese e-texts, both premodern and modern. Includes links to some of the biggest collections, including Aozora Bunko and the Japanese Text Initiative.
Kindai Digital Library: A National Diet Library project that has digitized more than 55,000 Meiji period texts.

Korean

National Digital Library: Provides both bibliographic and full-text information from a vast database of the collections of six major libraries in Korea. The number of digitized texts is increasing all the time.

Newspapers