UH 4504 SuperStudio: Recommended starting points for policy research

Background: overviews of public administration and policy

National Academy of Public Administration Studies
NAPA produces a number of reports and publications resulting from its dialogues, working papers, management studies, and forum results, Searchable and browseable.

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (2d ed) by James D. Wright, ed.
ISBN: 9780080970868
Publication Date: 2015
Fully revised and updated since the first edition (2001), IESBS 2/e comprises over 3,900 articles, commissioned by 71 section editors, and includes 90,000 bibliographic references as well as comprehensive name and subject indexes; more than 80 percent of the chapters are new or updated since the original text. Both its format and integrated chapters encourage discovery and map contexts and connections within the social and behavioral sciences. See also first edition (2001).

SAGE Knowledge: Politics & International Relations
Reference book collection from a major publisher of research works and text books in social sciences. Parent of CQ Press Library.

Most literature-searching will start here

Public Administration Abstracts from EBSCOhost
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Public Administration Abstracts indexes citations and abstracts of articles from public administration journals. 1974-present.
Worldwide Political Science Abstracts from ProQuest
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Worldwide Political Science Abstracts indexes citations and abstracts from journal articles, books, essays, book reviews, working papers, technical reports, theses, and dissertations in the social sciences related to politics. You can limit to peer-reviewed sources. 1975-present.
The database is building on the merged backfiles of Political Science Abstracts, published by IFI / Plenum, 1975-2000, and ABC POL SCI, published by ABC-CLIO, 1984-2000. Over 1,700+ titles are being monitored for coverage; of these, 67% are published outside the United States.

The references cited in the bibliography of the source article have been included for citations to core journals in political science, added to the database since 2001, and for all journals added since 2004. Each individual reference may also have links to an abstract and/or to other papers that cite that reference; these references are linked both within Worldwide Political Science Abstracts and across other social science databases from ProQuest. All records added since 2000 are indexed using a thesaurus of over 3,000 terms.

Major areas of coverage include:

Comparative politics
Developing nations
Disarmament
Economic policy
Electoral systems
Environmental policy
Government/Political systems
History and theory of political science
International relations/trade
Labor relations
Military policy
Methodology and research technology
Political behavior
Political economy
Political psychology
Politics and law
Politics and communication
Politics and religion
Politics and society
Public administration
Security and defense
Welfare systems

HeinOnline Portal
Large and wide-ranging collections of historical and contemporary legal materials, including codes, treaties, constitutions, topical collections of historical documents, law reviews (resembling JSTOR), legal treatises from the US, Canada, and the UK. Not limited to narrowly legal topics: includes, for example, Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture & Law.

VoxGov
VoxGov provides full-text media released published by the federal government and social media from official government sources.
GPO Monthly Catalog
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The catalog for U.S. government publications. Covers all types of U.S. government documents, including Congressional reports, hearings, debates, and records; judiciary materials; and documents issued by executive departments (Defense, State, Labor, Office of the President, etc.). Includes a bibliographic citation in each record. 1976-present.
SAGE Research Methods Online
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SAGE Research Methods indexes full-text books, reference sources, the "little green book" series (Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences), the "little blue book" series (Qualitative Research Methods), journal articles, and videos. Since this platform focuses on methodology rather than disciplines, it can be used by researchers from the social sciences, health sciences, and more. Full text available in HTML and PDF. You can limit searches by research method type. 1970s-present.
The Methods Map is an exciting and innovative visualization tool that can be used to discover relationships between methods, to discover new methods and to find content related to them. Underpinning the Methods Map is a new taxonomy of social science research methods, developed by SAGE, and containing over 1,400 unique terms.

The Methods Lists are lists of content within the product that our users have selected and want to share through this product. You can create your own lists, either for private use, or to share with others on the site.

The Little Green Books are our famous series, Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences. This entire series is available on SAGE Research Methods, with additional tools across the site to filter your search on just these titles.

For practitioners

O’Reilly Safari Learning Platform: Academic Edition
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O’Reilly Safari Learning Platform: Academic Edition provides over 38,000 full-text ebooks (HTML) and 30,000 hours of videos in computer science, information technology, and business. You must use your vt.edu email address to access ebooks. Please remember to log out when you're done so others may use the ebooks; use is limited by number of users.
You can also download ebooks through the O'Reilly mobile app. Download the app called "O'Reilly" from Play Store for Android or Apple Store for iOS. In order to use the app, you must create an account using your vt.edu email address; then you can login to O'Reilly using your personal account.

Ask a Librarian

Temporary, trial access only -- use while you can

The University Libraries at Virginia Tech regularly secure short-term, trial access to online resources in order to gauge their appropriateness to our university's teaching and research missions. These trials run in October, February, and sometimes April. Most trials run 30 days.

This box highlights some of these opportunities as they come available. All active trials are listed in a sidebar in the main Databases A-Z directory and as a tab atop this libguide.

Each entry includes a link to a user survey. I and other subject librarians invite you to email us moredetailed assessments of trial resources. Responses from the Virginia Tech community are vital to the library's deliberations about whether and when to acquire or enhance databases and the like.

As appropriate I will list all currently active trials and user survey links in a resource trials tab in this and my other libguides. Entries for trials I may include in here as elsewher in the body of my libguides will go away when the trial period ends.