Economics 77: Senior Departmental Honors Seminar
Professor Reyes
Fall 2007
For research or help with using the library, contact Susan Edwards (seedwards), 542-2676
Quick Lookups:
Dictionaries of Economics and Business, via Oxford Reference Online
International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences
Encyclopedia of Social Measurement
Wall Street Journal (1982 to current)
New York Times backfile (1851 to approximately 3 years from current date), and current through LexisNexis
Finding Articles :
EconLit with Fulltext is the premier economics database. It also allows you to login and save your citations, or re-run your search to see if there are any new articles (RSS), and has a visual interface that's good for broad searches.
WoPEc: Electronic Papers in Economics -- the latest research.
NBER Working Papers (National Bureau of Economic Research)
JSTOR Large backfile of fulltext journals in economics. Current titles through Project Muse, including these in economics.
Fulltext Journals in Economics and Finance via Elsevier
We have numerous other databases for interdisciplinary topics -- Economics and health, or education, or...
Getting Articles:
Sometimes you will find citations in footnotes that look interesting, and you want to see the article. "ACLinks" that helps you find fulltext from databases has another component "CitationLinker" that helps you search all of our electronic sources to see if it can find your article fulltext. If that doesn't work, and we don't have the journal in paper, you can always request it through InterLibrary Loan. It's free, it's (relatively) fast, it's a great resource.
Found the Perfect Article -- Want to See Who Cited It?
EconLit allows for some searching of Cited References. But there is also a very cool, and somewhat confusing, specialized tool to do just that. It's called the Social Sciences Citation Index and is available at AC through the Web of Science. It goes back to 1984... though the original article could be much older. This is a great way to see others who are building on the article that you found so useful.
Finding Data:
There are many different strategies for finding data.
- Use the economic literature approach, and see what data other authors in your topic are citing. Search EconLit (or the other sources above under finding articles) for a keyword and add (data or statistics or empirical).
- Footnote slogging -- check the footnotes of relevant articles or books. See what the author used as a source.
- Go directly to an agency, organization, or non-profit which produces or collects data. There are thousands of these, of course, so there are many attempts to provide lists or finding aids for them-- for example: Resources Online from the AC Econ Department, Data/Statistics from the AC Library (in addition to free resources, provides links to data we pay for). Sometimes the data is not available for free -- it may be possible for the library to purchase data to support your thesis.
- ICPSR (Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research) The world's largest archive of social science data, for use with statistical software such as SAS, SPSS, and Stata. This data is not freely available on the web -- AC belongs.
- Historic data -- Much of the data available has not been digitized. There are many sources available in paper which can be scanned in Seely Mudd with high quality OCR and exported into Excel. If you do create data from historic sources, ICPSR welcomes data submission (with all the appropriate metadata) and then makes it available to others. Data/Statistics above has links to some of the historic data sites that subscribe to or know about.
- Cooperation with UMass. UMass Business School (in addition to the library) has high cost business and finance datasets that AC does not own. In the past, they have allowed AC student to access the data, working with/through the AC faculty advisor.
- Asking other people -- besides the obvious (faculty) -- listservs like IASSIST.
More Books:
Sometimes there aren't enough books on topic for your thesis. If that's the case, WorldCat lets you search thousands of libraries -- including major research libraries. If you found a good subject heading in the Five College Catalog, you can use that same subject in WorldCat. (All the libraries are using the same controlled vocabulary -- the Library of Congress Subject Headings.) Once you find books you want, you can request them through InterLibrary Loan. Caution: ILL for books takes longer that articles, since they still have to be sent via snail mail.
Or sometimes you may think the book is important for Amherst College to own. In that case, fill out a Purchase Request and be sure to indicate that you are writing a thesis. These orders are processed "Rush".
Still not finding enough books? Sometimes, for a very recent or obscure topic you may want to find a dissertation. These are sometimes available through ILL, but often must be purchased. These take time, so you'd want to request soon.