Doing research in international relations

POLS 55 – Ethics & IR

Simon Elichko (they/he)
Social Sciences & Data Librarian

We'll talk about navigating some common challenges:

Paywalls & access
You can find news, but not research
Broken links
Social media

Paywalls

"You've run out of free articles for the month..."
"Pay $45 for this article PDF..."

Paywalls → Library Subscriptions

You can get articles from thousands of newspapers, magazines, and journals through Swarthmore's Libraries.

Find a specific article or publication:

Explore publications:

Tripod Library Search

Swarthmore's News & Magazines Guide

How to set up access

BrowZine

How to find an article

Scholarly journal article

Search Tripod for the article title. Look for a matching result and follow links to access.
(e.g. Teaching South African History in a Digital Age)
Can't find it in Tripod? Apply the search filter Include results without full text to see more results.
(see this example)
• If your article title appears in the new results, click on it.
• Follow the prompt to login to Tripod, then click on Request via Interlibrary Loan.
• The request form should be filled out for you - just submit it!

News article (not research)

Search Tripod for the publication title (e.g. Foreign Affairs), not the article title.
Look for a matching result and follow links to access.

If the above steps don't work:

You can fill out the journal article request form to get a PDF by email.

Libraries share resources with each other (legally), and this is a free service - always free to you, and usually for the libraries as well. Turnaround time is typically 1-2 days.

Find request links on the Borrow Beyond TriCo, linked from Tripod.

Paywalls

News and research

Broken links

Social media

You can find news, but no scholarly research

Information Timeline Graphic by adstarkel. Used under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Think about the information timeline:

Try to diagnose the problem more precisely:

Events are too recent
- Is there research on what led up to the current situation?
- What are the broader issues involved?
- Try resources listed in the Think Tanks section of
  the POLS 55 Research Guide
Nothing good is coming up in Google
- Try searching Tripod, Google Scholar, or another database
- Put any two-word phrase in quotes
  examples: "climate change" "democratic peace"
Can't find the right kind of scholarly perspective
- Try searching the Web of Science database
  - Use "Web of Science Categories" filter to pull up articles published in political science or international relations journals.

You can find news, but not research

Another common problem:
There's way too much research, how to narrow it down?

Try strategies listed in Evaluating Sources

How to search within citing sources:

Choose an article or book from class that seems potentially interesting for your project (e.g. "Liberalism and World Politics" - Doyle)
Search for the article/book in Google Scholar
Pull up the citing sources
Enable "search within citing sources" and try some different keywords

Paywalls

News and research

Broken links

Social media