SOLIS - Social Science Literature Information System

SOLIS contains information on German social science literature - journal articles, contributions in compilations, monographs, and grey literature - from the following disciplines:

In addition to that, SOLIS covers further interdisciplinary areas of the social sciences, such as, for example, research on women, research on leisure, gerontology, social welfare (see also social science classification as well as social science journals).

Contents and updates

More than 370,000 social science publications are presented together in SOLIS with a short description of the contents (May 2008). 16,000 to 18,000 new references are added annually.

There are web links to full text entries for more than 25,000 references to new publications: included therein are articles in online journals, research reports - predominantly from institutional series -, as well as congress reports and dissertations.

The development of the database is a dynamic process in relation to the disciplines covered, the types of documents, and the myriad of evaluated documents. The first stock in 1978 consisted of about 8,000 bibliographic references from German sociology from 1945 to 1977. Further areas, such as, for example, labour market and employment research or science of communication have been included in SOLIS since the end of the 70s and the beginning of the 80s with the cooperation of specialised institutes. The references to grey literature stretch back as far as ca. 1977. In this area, the degree of coverage is much smaller, because of the costly measures necessary for acquisition, and is limited to institutional series, such as, for example, the series of the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (Social Science Research Center Berlin). Previously unpublished research reports from the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) have been actively sought and acquired for SOLIS since 1990. The sociology of the GDR is therefore to date the only discipline from the countries of the former Eastern Bloc whose references have been systematically prepared, with location given; these are now searchable on SOLIS and therefore available for loan from libraries and archives.

The entire current holdings of the SOLIS database are accessible via the hosts STN International and GENIOS German Business Information resp. the wiso-net (subscriptions to universities) as well as via sowiport.

Sources

The SOLIS database is produced by GESIS in cooperation with the Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung der Bundesagentur für Arbeit (Institute for Employment Research of the Federal Employment Services) in Nuremberg, the editors of the Journal of Political Science and the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (Social Science Research Center Berlin). These institutions, with whom GESIS has worked for many years, deliver about 20% of the yearly input to SOLIS via their documentation from specialised areas. In addition, arrangements exist with information centres in neighbouring disciplines - with the Zentrum für Psychologische Information und Dokumentation (The German Center for Documentation and Information in Psychology) in Trier and the Deutsches Institut für Internationale Pädagogische Forschung (German Institute for International Educational Research) in Frankfurt/Main.

In addition to the monographs and compilations, GESIS, together with its cooperating partners, currently examines around 300 journals for relevant articles and passes these to SOLIS. The list of social science journals includes the journal title, the institution carrying out the examination for SOLIS, and an assessment of its relevancy for the social sciences.

Ordering copies of publications