Finding Contexts: Three Approaches

SUBJECT BIBLIOGRAPHIES

Oxford Bibliographies Online (key resource)

OBO entries combine the best features of the annotated bibliography with an authoritative subject encyclopedia  in order to help you identify some of the most important and influential scholarship on a broad topic.

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

Sample entries relevant to WGS 1274 might include:

 


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 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.>

TIPS

1. 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.

2. 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 limiter will also work. Typically, literature review is listed under "Document Type" or "Methodology" in the filter options you're given.

 


HANDBOOKS/COMPANIONS

Examples from HOLLIS::

 

The Academic Research Conversation: Beyond JSTOR and HOLLIS

News Media and Policy Discussions

Factiva

A news and business information database produced by the Dow Jones company, containing contentfrom more than 200 countries (and in 28 languages, though English predominates). Material is drawn from newspapers, news sites, newswires, TV and radio transcripts.

Full-text coverage varies by title, but is generally better from 1980 forward. Factiva is the major competitor to Nexis Uni (see below) for current news access.

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).

Think Tank Search (HKS Library)

A customized Google search that aggregates content from institutions that generate public policy research, analysis, and activity. These sites are affiliated with universities, governments, advocacy groups, foundations, and non-governmental organizations. The Think Tank page also lists other resources for uncovering whitepapers and research that normally does not appear in scholarly journal publications.

 

Data: Numbers and Opinions

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.

TheiPoll 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.

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.

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.

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

 

Research Methods

Sage Research Methods Online

The ultimate methods library, it has more than 1000 books, reference works, journal articles, case studies, and instructional videos by world-leading academics from across the social sciences. It also boasts the largest collection of qualitative methods books available online from any scholarly publisher.

Users can browse content by topic, discipline, or format type (reference works, book chapters, definitions, etc.).  SRM offers several research tools as well: a methods map;  user- created readng lists; a project planner' and advice on choosing statistical tests.

Examples of topics related to 1274 themes: