Economics of the European Union
Library Session: Literature + Data Searching
Ryan Clement
who am I?
- I'm Ryan, the Data Services Librarian
- I use he/him/his pronouns
- I work with the Economics, Geography, Sociology, Anthropology, & Philosophy departments
- I help people find and use data
- I can help with all stages of your research!
- You can find more at go/ryan/
what are we covering today?
- keyword searching concepts
- literature review sources
- searching for data
keyword searching
- break your question into concepts
- think of synonyms for the concepts: use language from the literature
- be ready to be flexible on which concepts are most important: e.g. is geography really the most important?
Let's try it!
boolean logic
*most databases assume "and"
remember!
- searching the literature is iterative
- learn from your searches
- keep a record of your searches: start a text file
economics literature sources
- EconLit (go/econlit/)
- EconPapers (go/econpapers/)
- Scopus (go/scopus/)
- Google Scholar (scholar.google.com)
finding data
who/what
when
where
who
- what level of observation/unit of analysis
- people (individuals, households, etc)
- organizations (colleges, nations, companies, etc)
- things (cars, crops, houses)
when
- one point in time: cross sectional
- changes over time: time series
- same group over time: longitudinal/panel
- current data vs historical data
where
- geography: national vs subnational
- not all political or administrative boundaries match up
- level of geography you need affects where you look
data sources
- data archives (UK Data Archive, GESIS, CESSDA)
- data producers (government organizations, academic researchers, private sector, etc)
- look to the literature (i.e. look for data citations)
- look to statistics compilations (ProQuest Statistical Abstracts of the World)