Useful On-line Research Databases
The university spends a fortune on these database tools. They are extremely useful. The real value of the digital sources comes from collecting a large archive, and then examining it very critically to find the politics that is at work in events.
LibKey Nomad Extension | https://www.wits.ac.za/library/libkey/ LibKey Nomad is a free browser extension from Third Iron (available for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, Brave, and Vivaldi) that connects users from article and book-chapter citations on scholarly webpages directly to the full text, drawing on both Wits' subscriptions and open-access sources.
List of all Wits subscriptions https://libguides.wits.ac.za/c.php?g=226934
Sabinet Africa Journals https://0-journals-co-za.innopac.wits.ac.za/ A South African aggregator platform, launched in 2003 by Sabinet, a Southern African information provider founded in 1983. It is the most comprehensive full-text collection of South African journals, with over 680 titles organised into roughly 10 disciplinary collections, holding more than 543,000 articles dating from 1910 to the present. Subject coverage spans law, medicine, social sciences, and humanities, with particular depth in heritage, identity, history, indigenous knowledge, and cultural studies. Sabinet carries the locally published South African scholarly record that the international platforms (ScienceDirect, Wiley) largely miss — including titles relevant to the social science of technology, governance, and law that publish through South African learned societies rather than the major commercial houses.
ScienceDirect https://0-www-sciencedirect-com.innopac.wits.ac.za/ A full-text platform that hosts over 18 million publications from more than 4,000 academic journals and 30,000 e-books. Coverage is weighted toward science, technology, and medicine, but a Social & Behavioral Sciences collection is included. For the social science of technology, its strengths lie in journals on information systems, technology adoption, and STS-adjacent titles (e.g. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Telecommunications Policy). African coverage is incidental rather than curated — useful for development-economics and energy-transition research, less so for area studies.
EBSCO https://0-research-ebsco-com.innopac.wits.ac.za/ A host platform for many discrete databases rather than a single corpus, and the strongest of this list for African content. Africa-Wide Information (produced by NISC South Africa) is a multidisciplinary index combining dozens of African and international databases — covering news, scholarly articles, books, reports, theses and grey literature from all 56 African countries, including the Index to South African Periodicals and African Journals Online. The newer Africa Studies Source adds more than 656 magazines and journals, including 614 peer-reviewed titles, with explicit coverage of science & technology alongside politics and economics. For the technology angle, EBSCO's Applied Science & Technology Source and Sociology Source Ultimate are the relevant components.
Proquest | https://0-search-proquest-com.innopac.wits.ac.za/index Best known for Dissertations & Theses Global, with over 6 million metadata records and 4 million full-text documents drawn from institutions worldwide including Africa — valuable for surfacing unpublished African graduate research on technology and society. Its Social Science Premium Collection bundles authoritative A&I databases (IBSS, Sociological Abstracts, Worldwide Political Science Abstracts) with over 4,300 full-text titles across sociology, political science, and development. For technology specifically, ProQuest's strength is the combination of indexing depth and grey literature (reports, working papers, conference proceedings).
Wiley Online https://0-onlinelibrary-wiley-com.innopac.wits.ac.za/ A multidisciplinary publisher platform of over 1,800 journals, around half published with scholarly societies, with backfiles spanning three centuries across 900+ titles. For the social science of technology, the relevant clusters are Communication & Media Studies, Development Studies, and Science & Technology Studies journals. African coverage is again subject-driven rather than regional, though it hosts the Africa Research Bulletin (economic and political series, 1997–present).
Gale Primary Sources https://0-go-gale-com.innopac.wits.ac.za A historical-archives platform combining monographs, manuscripts, newspapers, maps, and photographs across hundreds of years. Its value is for the history of technology, infrastructure, and society rather than current social science. African-relevant collections include dedicated African Studies archives, Nineteenth Century Collections Online, Part V: Europe and Africa, Colonialism and Culture, the Decolonisation archive, and historical newspaper runs (Times Digital Archive, The Economist Historical Archive). Gale itself notes South African coverage spanning the mineral revolution, the 1910 Union, and the apartheid era.
NewsBank https://0-infoweb-newsbank-com.innopac.wits.ac.za Its core product, Access World News, is a large full-text news aggregator covering over 4,500 sources at local, regional, national, and international levels, supporting subject areas including technology, sociology, anthropology, and political science. It offers a dedicated Access World News – Africa module (selected African media, rolling ~10-year window) and, via Readex, the World Newspaper Archive: African Newspapers — more than 40 searchable African newspapers from the 19th and 20th centuries across Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Zimbabwe and more. Strong for tracing technology debates and infrastructure coverage in the press over time.
Nexis Uni | Lexis-Nexis | http://www.nexisuni.com/?federationidp=KTGZNK75321 The academic edition of LexisNexis, with over 17,000 vetted news, legal, and business sources and a deep news archive reaching back to 1980. Its distinctive strength for the social science of technology is the integration of legal and regulatory material — full-text court decisions, statutes, agency regulations, and law-review articles — alongside profiles for over 80 million companies and full-text SEC filings. This makes it well suited to technology-accountability, platform-liability, and corporate-history research. African content is accessible through international newspapers and titles such as The Africa Report.