How to Find Politics and IR resources

How to Find Politics and IR resources

Politics and international relations are two very broad descriptions incorporating elements of many different subjects such as economics, business, law, education and even history. The University Library uses the Dewey Decimal Classification scheme (go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_decimal for a quick introduction ) to organise books and other materials; politics is at 320 and IR roughly 327. They are parts of social science and can be found on Floor 6 of The Sir Duncan Rice Library.

This guide aims to give you a very quick introduction to the various resources available to you. If you would like any further information or help with finding and using resources, please contact the Social Science Subject Team based on Floor 6 of The Sir Duncan Rice Library, or email the Information Consultant for Politics and International Relations, Claire Molloy: c.a.l.molloy@abdn.ac.uk .

New to the Library?

Finding Resources

You can use Primo to find items to read, particularly where you have been given details in a reading list but we have other tools you can use to find even more. Resources such as International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS): http://www.proquest.com/shibboleth produced by the London School of Economics and covers social and cultural anthropology, sociology, education, economics, and the political sciences. It provides access to over 2.5 million references dating back to 1951 and current data is taken from over 2,800 selected journals and around 7000 books per annum. A quick guide is available online .

We pay a lot of money for resources such as these and you will have to log in to read anything you find - check out the relevant library guide for details.

Social Theory https://search.alexanderstreet.com/soth offers an extensive selection of documents that explore the complexities and interpret the nature of social behaviour and organization. The collection includes more than 122,000 pages from 346 works by 100 authors. Highlights include 33 volumes of the Complete Works of Marx and Engels and nearly 26,000 pages of German language content. Our quick guide is available online.

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) https://doaj.org covers open access journal from across the world and across many disciplines.

The Hathi Trust https://www.hathitrust.org - founded in 2008, HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving 17+ million digitized items. Anyone can view public domain materials - some is not protected by copyright.

OECD iLibrary www.oecd-ilibrary.org/ is the online library of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) featuring its books, working papers and statistics and is the gateway to OECD's analysis and data. It contains content published by the International Energy Agency (IEA), the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA), the OECD Development Centre, PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), and the International Transport Forum (ITF).

UK Data Archive www.data-archive.ac.uk/ is the UK's only nationally-funded research infrastructure for the curation and provision of access to social science data. The service provides unified access to the UK's largest collection of social, economic and population data for research and teaching purposes covering a range of different disciplines.

Box of Broadcasts (BOB) https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand contains BBC broadcasts since 1990s and permanent archive of BBC, ITV and Channel 4 and related broadcasts as well as recording of 65 free to air tv channels - millions of broadcasts. Saved lists, create clips...

Resources by Geographical Region

There are lots of Open Access (OA) and other resources available - OA means that these are free to read, whereas other resources may require you to log in (like IBSS) to search and log in to read anything you find. CIA 'Country Files': https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/

Reading smarter and evaluating

Getting as much as you can out of your reading requires focus and evaluation skills. The following are just some tips to help:

Reference Management

You might find it useful to organise the references you have found. There are many different free and 'freemium' resources available to help you with your reference management. Try using Wikipedia's reference management software comparison document. UoA subscribe to ProQuest RefWorks:
https://refworks.proquest.com/

Questions?

Contact the Information Consultant for politics and international relations, Claire Molloy: c.a.l.molloy@abdn.ac.uk

Last revised by Claire Molloy, August 2023