Social Studies 98

Think Tank Search 

Prouduced at our HKS Library, this site brings together the policy writings of 1200 think tanks, US and global, from across the ideological spectrum. Publications of think tanks, while often influential, are scattered across the web and thus difficult to canvass -- so a workaround, like this site, helps you get around that access problem.

The Think Tank Search page also contatins links to several other important public policy sites. 

Research Move 1: Build on a Lead You Have Already: The 'Item in Hand' Approach

Key Resource: Google Scholar

Why: You already know the value of examining footnotes and bibliographies for related scholarship or for identifying primary source material.  And you know that whenever you find material by these means, a quick HOLLIS search by book or article title will identify your access options.

Sometimes, though, you want to look beyond the item in hand -- not look at its antecedents but at its descendants -- the scholarship produced later and after, that has cited your item in its bibliography and footnotes. Following citation trails (Cited By) is a long-standing scholarly practice.

RESEARCH MOVE 2:  Look for a more or less recent research overview on your topic or its broader dimensions.

Key Resource: Annual Reviews

Why: Literature reviews help you easily understand—and contextualize—the principal contributions that have been made in your field. They not only track trends over time in the scholarly discussions of a topic, but also synthesize and connect related work. They cite the trailblazers and sometimes the outliers, and they even root out errors of fact or concept. Typically, they include a final section that identifies remaining questions or future directions research might take.

Example Review:

• Walter, Stefanie. 2021. “The Backlash Against Globalization.” Annual Review of Political Science 24 (1): 421–42.

Pro Tip: 

• Watch your nomenclature. In the discipline of history, the common term for this research format is historiography.

Other Strategies for locating literature reviews:

• In subject databases, like those described above, you'll often be able to limit by literature review or review essay or historiography. You may need look for these these filters under the document type or methodology category. 
• In book-length studies, the introduction (by author[s] or editor[s]) often acts as miniaturized lit review.  In the process of announcing its purpose and origins, introductions identify the intellectual forbears who laid the groundwork.
• In dissertations, lit reviews commonly appear as an introductory or preliminary chapter. Try ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global. Dissertations aren't peer-reviewed in the same way that  published articles and academic books are, but they can also be a source for topics that are emerging, trending, or very current. 

Research Move 3: Check for a subject bibliography as a way to direct your reading.

Key Resource: Oxford Bibliographies Online

Why: Selective rather than exhaustive and combining a bit of description with a little bit of evaluation, OBO entries help you identify some of the most important and influential scholarship on a broad social, political, cultural or interdisciplinary disciplinary topic.

Your very focused research question may not have a bibliography, but its larger dimensions - or its theoretical implications or something intellectually "adjacent" to it are likely to have some representation. 

(Often, though, the issue in information-seeking isn't scarcity of material but overabundance. OBO entries can help you solve the dilemma of knowing who to read first, what to read for, or simply which voices in the conversation you should give some fuller attention to.)

Example Entries: 

• Economic Globalization (Sociology module)
• French Colonial Rule  (African Studies module)
• Nationalism (Philosophy module)
• Public Opinion in Europe Toward the European Union (Political Science module)

Research Move 4: Deploy Language Strategically to Surface Backgrounds, Contexts, and Agenda-Setting Materials

Key Resource: HOLLIS 

Examples: 

• handbook or companion: this is a key academic format, regardless of discipline and denotes a published book that republishes ground-breaking work, or commissions scholarly essays that summarize standard approaches and important or consensus views. Other terms to try: reader or anthology.
• debate or controversy (or controvers* to pick up variants), or contested or disputed often help you surface works that identify the "stakes" of a particular argument, action, phenomenon, etc. So will words like proponents, advocates or their opposites: opponents or critics. Political scientists favor the term puzzle to express these ideas. 
• theory or theoretical or philosophy or philosophical might help you find works in larger contexts or examined via a "lens" of some kind.  You can truncate these terms, too, by the way: theor*, philosoph*
• history is a way to get at full-length studies not just of countries or events, but also of ideas and concepts and broad subjects. 
• historiograph*  can surface materials that address and synthesize approaches historians have used over time. 
• narrative* or case study or interview* or even the phrase "lived experiences" angles topics toward approach as do the more general terms, qualitative, quantitative, and  mixed methods.
• To identify anthropologically-focused topics, ethnography (or ethnograph*) is an option to try. 

Public Opinion in New Democracies and Developing Nations HARVARD KEY

• This Oxford Bibliography identifies and differentiates many data sources, including the ICPRS and various "Barometer" series.

HL Guides to Statistics and Data

• Browseable collection of guides on topics from on micro and macro-data  resources.

Harvard Kennedy School Research Guides

• Science and Technology Policy
• International Development
• National and International Security

NON-ENGLISH

There are times when you'll want to limit your search results in HOLLIS by languages.  If you feel most comfortable reading scholarship in English (or if you don't work in a  language other than English), the easiest way to eliminate foreign language results is simply by using the LANGUAGE FILTER, which displays on the right side of hour HOLLIS results screen. 

Sometimes  though, students want results in a language than HOLLIS. You can use the filter post-search, of course to drill a linguistic set. 

You can also rig up a search from the start that. Here's how: 

• From the HOLLIS advanced search screen, change the field in the first box from keyword to CODE: Marc language. 
• Enter the first 3 (English letters) of the language you want to search in -- e.g.,  spa  for Spanish language (not esp). 
• On the next line(s), add your keyword terms and run the search.

Click the image below to see this trick in action. 

NON-ROMAN

• Brief Library FAQ on searching non-Roman scripts in HOLLIS
• Romanization and Transliteration (from the Middle East and Islamic Studies library guide)
• Official Transliteration Tables for Non-Roman Scripts from the Library of Congress (includes Arabic, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Vietnamese, Chinese, etc.)

• Set up a Check Harvard Library Bookmark. It works like a browser extension that you click on when you need it. Directions are available here: https://library.harvard.edu/services-tools/check-harvard-library-bookmark.
• Tweak your Google Scholar Settings: One simple change can turn Scholar into what's effectively a Harvard database -- with links to the full-text of articles that the library can provide. Here's what to do:  Look to the left of the GS screen and click on the "hamburger" (); then click on .  Look for "Library Links."  Then type Harvard into the search box and save your choice.  

This free, open source citation management tool makes the process of collecting and organizing citations, incorporating them into your paper, and creating a bibliography or works cited page stress-free and nearly effortless.

It's worth the small investment of time to learn Zotero. A good guide, produced by Harvard librarians, is available here: http://guides.library.harvard.edu/zotero.