Dr. Alistair (Alix) Howard

| Research tips                           

   
   
 

 
 
 

Welcome

Print-published resources or sources that were originally print-published are frequently higher quality than purely web-based content. This is because long-standing newspapers, news and opinion magazines, academic journals, and so on all have editors and editorial procedures. They tend not to publish the first thing that comes to a writers' mind. In this respect they're better than most blogs.

More importantly, they are frequently better at making clear their political, theoretical, and methodological biases. Even when they're not, it's likely that their positions will be well known in the community of scholars and readers. In this respect they're better than partisan websites.

Your research assignment may require that you have a minimum number of various kinds of resources. These are likely to include books, but also different types of periodicals (periodicals are published on a regular schedule). Note that these tend to be available on the Web for a fee (with some content free) but are usually available through our library databases.

The different kinds of published periodicals can be confusing. There are different ways of distinguishing periodicals. Many differentiate between (a) popular magazines, (b) trade and specialist magazines, and (c) scholarly journals. A useful guide is at the University of Maryland's Library website. Others break out opinion magazines from (b).

In my view the following distinctions are useful. My Delicious tags for each are capitalized [in brackets]:

  • Newspapers (eg: Financial Times, etc--and The Economist!?) [NEWS]
  • Popular magazines (eg: Time, Newsweek, Entertainment Week) [POPMAG]
  • Opinion journals (eg: Dissent, Middle East Quarterly) [OPJOURN]
  • Specialist/trade/industry press (eg: Advertising Week) [TRADEPRESS]
  • Scholarly journals, many of which are peer reviewed. [PEERREV]

Note that assigning categories is subjective and can even be arbitrary. The Economist, for example, calls itself a newspaper. Still, for help telling one from the other, go here.

You'll also want to consult other material that's available through the World Wide Web:

  • Reports, analysis, or data from think tanks, government entitites, non-governmental organizations, inter-governmental organizations, or advocacy groups (eg: OECD, IMF, World Bank, US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Commerce Department, Economic Policy Institute, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, etc).

General research advice 

Maintaining a comprehensive and current list of resources for political-economic research is beyond the capabilities of a well adjusted person. Those listed here are suggestions only, and are heavily biased towards sites that are extensively cited and those that I myself find informative and well written. You’ll probably have heard them mentioned in class.

For a particular topical search, you might proceed as follows:

  • Read your textbook or the assigned readings for the class; look at the 'additional reading' section and/or the author's bibliography and footnotes
  • Go to the lbrary and, doing a keyword or title search to begin with, dive into the stacks and see what leaps at you from the shelve. Books are probably the best place to find background information and theoretical perspectives.
  • Search Academic Search Premier for current news articles on the topic--to see what folks are saying in general. To save yourself time at this stage, begin by limit your reading to publications I've recommended, such as The Economist, Financial Times, etc.
  • Brainstorm a bit, narrowing down your topic and refining a research question. You must have a research question. It's best to limit it early and then widen it if you have to rather than the other way around.
  • Search Academic Search Premier for academic journal articles on the topic you've selected
  • Talk to a research librarian about your topic. Be sure you do some work first to impress them that you're on the ball.

Again, before doing anything, consult your textbook. The relevant country and/or thematic chapters will provide you a broad overview in which to situate your research question and theoretical perspective. It may also have further reading and research resource suggestions appended. You can also review the outlines or powerpoint slides for class, and/or your notes. Try to think in the conceptual terms we've used in class.

Be sure you go to the library. Search the library catalog for some general books on the issue, policy, or country you're interested in. Identify several books with promising titles, and then actually go to the stacks (preferably at Paley but Ambler if nothing else). Locate the book you've identified and then look around the section to see what else you find. Browsing the stacks is often as good as or better than using the catalog for finding useful books. Remember as well that many useful chapters will be buried in edited volumes but may not be obviously relevant from the book title. You need to spend some time browsing. And check books out to help justify the Library’s budget.

If you’re writing a research paper that requires political, legal, or business news from the past fifteen years or so, you will find a vast array of material at LexisNexis Academic, which is a database service available through the Library’s online resources page, and through TUPortal off campus. There are of course lots of other database services there too. An excellent source for peer-reviewed academic journal articles is Academic Search Premier (EbscoHost).

You can do keyword searches in Academic Search Premier and launch further, more specific searches once you’ve identified a useful article. The best way to do this is to find an appropriate article and open its record. It will have a list of ‘subject terms’ which are hyperlinks to other citations/articles that share that subject term. The new list this generates is likely to be useful. Another approach is to limit your search to the journals that you identify as useful. Again, you can do that by clicking on the ‘source’ for the record you have open. This runs another search limited to that source.

Comparative politics

There are those who keep comprehensive link sites. For politics generally, Richard Kimber's site, at KeeleUniversity in the UK, is an exhaustive and well regarded compilation of links to government sites, parties, organizations, academic & media sources, and so on. He also keeps a blog on British politics.  The Yahoo country directories are also up to date and comprehensive, although obviously in the relevant language. See, for example, Yahoo UK on politics, Yahoo France on politics, and Yahoo Deutschland on politics.  They also have news sites indexed, of course.

For comparative background material, various governments produce bland country profiles. These include the UK Foreign Office, the US State Department, and the French Foreign Ministry. You won't find too much of real use for papers in these, however.

Information about elections around the world is provided by IFES and is available at ElectionGuide.org.

For formal-institutional stuff, there are translations of constitutions are available at International Constitutional Law

Political economy

Useful Data sources on US economy, esp incomes and wealth: Statistical Abstract of the United States, annually from Census Bureau; another is the annual State of Working America, published by the Economic Policy Institute.

For international and foreign political economy, check out the major inter-governmental and international non-governmental organizations. The Bretton Woods organizations collect much data and have a handle on the state of the world: International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and World Trade Organization (The latter was hilariously spoofed by an agit-prop group called The Yes Men—and see the movie of that name—tho’ you won’t find much for papers there). The International Labour Office is the Bretton Woods’ group’s older and poorer cousin. It is obviously subservient in the global political economy but does have good data.  The OECD is thirty-member international, market-friendly non-governmental think tank. It provides a great deal of useful (because standardized) comparative statistical data, much of which is free. University libraries hold many of their publications, including their regular country reports. Also, see OECD Resources by country. It's not unfair, I think, to say that OECD is the official propaganda arm of global neo-liberalism.  Another excellent source for raw data is the Center for International Comparisons at the University of Pennsylvania.

News and current affairs

Good news sources include The Financial Times and The Economist, although they are cousin publications and their coverage is frequently similar.  Each of these is available online through the Library portal in the news and current affairs databases. Access World News has the Financial Times organized for browsing by issue as well as searchable, but there seems to be a 1 or 2 day delay in uploading. The New York Times is available same day, as are other US papers. So, if you want to save money on a subscription, that's the way. Of course, you can't read it in the pub, unless you're prepared to look like a prat with a laptop. Lexis Nexis has the Financial Times same day of publication. Select the SEARCH and NEWS tabs and POWERSEARCH tabs, and pull down menu for SELECT SOURCES. Specify TODAY and off you go.

The London Times, The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal are, of course, respected. They are tiresomely mainstream. The London Times has the drawback of being owned by Murdoch and the Post assumes its readers are idiots, for some reason. The Wall Street Journal has great journalists but this doesn't make up for its oddly reactionary editorial pages. I suggest the Financial Times, which has the virtue of being concise and sensibly cosmocratic. It's what the people who turn left when they get on international flights read.

The British Guardian is worth a look, especially for Steve Bell’s cartoons.  Also check out Le Monde-Diplomatique,  Agence France Presse, and  Die Welt. The Indymedia pages are also worth checking out as a grass-roots democratic source. Their Philly page is here.

Truthout is essential.

Generally good writing ranging across cultural and political spheres s is at: Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker. Save time on reading long books and fit in at lefty bourgeois East Coast dinner parties by reading long review articles at New York Review of Books. Dissent is a social democratic journal with longer articles.  The pulp fiction of printed political commentary is offered by newspaper pundits, some of whom are distributed by Creator’s Syndicate