Finding Contexts: Three Approaches

ANNOTATED SUBJECT BIBLIOGRAPHIES

Oxford Bibliographies Online (key resource)

OBO entries are expert-curated and designed to help you identify some of the most important and influential scholarship on a broad topic. 

Sample entries relevant to WGS 1274 might include:

Pro Tips:

  • A very narrowly defined topic may not yield results you expect, so in that case, just go a little more broad. 
  • To track down items you identify in the OBO, copy and paste the titles of articles and books  into HOLLIS to determine if we have access to it here (print or online), or if we need to borrow a copy of it for you through Interlibrary Loan. 

HANDBOOKS/COMPANIONS

Examples from HOLLIS:

 

LITERATURE REVIEWS

Annual Reviews  (CLASSIC RESOURCE)

Since 1932, the Annual Reviews series has offered authoritative syntheses of the primary research literature in 46 academic fields, including economics, law, political science, and sociology.

Literature reviews are essays, sometimes lengthy, that can 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 essays from Annual Reviews: 

Pro Tips:

  • If you find a review that seems on point, but rather dated (10 years or so), try searching for it (or one of the authorities it cites) in Google Scholar. Then follow the cited by links. You may discover something more recent there.
  • Lit reviews can be searched for in other databases.Sometimes, adding the the phrase "literature review" to a keyword search will surface these publications.  Sometimes, using a filter will also work. Typically, literature review is listed under "Document Type" or "Methodology" in the filter options you're given.

 

 

Best Bets for Finding Research: Beyond HOLLIS and Google Scholar

 

News Media and Policy Discussions

Nexis Uni

A powerful news database which covers more than 3000 newspapers from around the globe, most in English (or English translation). Coverage varies by title but usually dates from the 1980s forward. Nexis Uni is also good for searching  transcripts of major TV and radio news broadcasts (including the BBC and NPR).

Find Policy (U.S.)

 This search page focuses on 14 leading think tanks that work on "public policy" (education, law & justice, urban issues, and many more) in a broad sense, with a focus on the United States. Remember that Think Tanks can be liberal, conservative, or center. 

Policy Commons 

The world's most comprehensive policy database, with over 17 million reports from 41,000 think tanks, agencies, governments, and cities.

 

 

Data: Numbers, Opinions, Visualizations

Pew Research Center

The Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world by conducting public opinion polling, demographic research, content analysis and other data-driven social science research. Pew is non-profit, non-partisan, and non-advocacy.

Roper Center| Roper iPoll

The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, located at Cornell University, is one of the world’s leading archives of social science data, specializing in data from public opinion surveys.

The iPoll section of the site enables you to search 650,000 actual public opinion questions.

Since its beginning, the Roper Center has focused on surveys conducted by the news media and commercial polling firms. However, it also holds many academic surveys, including important historical collections from the National Opinion Research Center and Princeton University’s Office of Public Opinion Research.

Statista

A statistics portal that integrates over 60,000 diverse topics of data and facts from over 10,000 sources onto a single platform. Sources of information include market researchers, trade publications, scientific journals, and government databases.

The General Social Survey (GSS)

Gathers data on contemporary American society in order to monitor and explain trends and constants in attitudes, behaviors, and attributes. Hundreds of trends have been tracked since 1972. In addition, since the GSS adopted questions from earlier surveys, trends can be followed for up to 70 years.

The GSS contains a standard core of demographic, behavioral, and attitudinal questions, plus topics of special interest. Among the topics covered are civil liberties, crime and violence, intergroup tolerance, morality, national spending priorities, psychological well-being, social mobility, and stress and traumatic events.

The GSS Data Explorer allows you to select variables and extract data in SPSS or SAS to analyze trends yourself. Or you can  search on the Key Trends page, topically arranged, for premade graphs.

 

Guides and People at Harvard

Our government documents and data librarians can help you sort through the complexities of where data sets are located (or even whether there's good data on a topic that interests you).

Research guides on finding and using data of various kinds at Harvard are collected here: Beginner's Guide to Locating and Using Numeric Data.

If you're new to visualization techniques, you'll find information on types and their various argumentative strengths on this Law School Library guide: Visualization Tools

  • Lamont Library's Media Services department offers personalized consultations and a variety of ongoing workshops. Read more about our Visualization Support