American politics & government: Main PSCI-IS guide

This main subject guide for political science identifies principal resources for political and international studies research at Virginia Tech. The Other political science research guides tab is a menu that connects you to related, subordinate subject guides for the major subfields of the discipline and also for related programs in the VT School of Public & International Affairs.

Resources listed on this page are grouped into Background information sources; Essential databases for accessing serious literature on politics; Research starters; and access to selected Resources available for short-term trials.

Parts of this guide are also available in Bruce Pencek's related subject guides: Data sources for social research;  News/journalism/streaming media;  Advice for searching/citing/engaging scholarly literatures; and Accessing VT Library resources from off campus.

You can start with a hot topic

If you're fishing for a topic, often a good place to start is current controversies.  If your reaction to a statement is "How could someone say something like that?", run with it -- not to refute it but to discover and explain whatever evidence and reasoning might lead a reasonable person to say "something like that" is true or right in some respect or under some circumstances, which your research and analysis will test.

The "In context" family of databases from Gale lay out pro-cons of controversies with articles and data from scholarly journals and popular sources. Use them to refine and focus your own thinking;  use their references to find trustworthy scholarship, data, and primary sources;  and especially to harvest on-target search terms to use in subject-oriented databases like Worldwide Political Science Abstracts or HeinOnline.   These can be especially useful for political and political science/international studies research:

• Opposing Viewpoints In Context from Gale
• Global Issues in Context from Gale

You risk violating the Honor Code if you rely only on the "canned" sources in these databases for assignments that expect you to do your own research design, searching, and analyses. Check with your instructor.

Often predefined topics won't keep up with events.  Peer-reviewed scholarship can take two years and more to appear after an event.  Journalism may be your best available source of information.  News sources might identify experts in universities, government, think tanks, or industry who have published research about similar events or problems that you can apply.

• Access World News from Newsbank is a broad-based collection of news reports with a straightforward interface. (Factiva is bigger and more powerful but a bit harder to learn.)
• Academic OneFile from Gale is a bridge between journalism and other popular sources and scholarship across many disciplines. You may find it is more manageable than the "discovery" search box on the library homepage.

You can start with published data

If data have been published, there is research behind them.  Reputable data collections will provide source information: who or what agency collected and analyzed the data, when.  Data citations will often include titles of publications that can connect you to datasets collected over time and/or across related questions in one place or period.  These data collections are good starters:

• Our World in Data
• Data Planet from SAGE

All current Virginia Tech students, faculty, and staff, regardless of your location, may request through ILLiad for materials:

• not owned by Virginia Tech (books, articles from journals and conference proceedings, book chapters, standards, and technical papers)
• owned by Virginia Tech but are unavailable for use (print books)
• owned by Virginia Tech and available in print (scans of articles from journals and conference proceedings, book chapters, standards, and technical papers)

We ship requests via UPS to users outside the immediate Blacksburg area (Montgomery, Giles and Pulaski counties).

Articles, book chapters, and many technical papers are delivered in PDF format to your ILLiad account. Occasionally, due to copyright restrictions, a paper copy of an article or standard is held for your at the Newman User Services Desk or sent o the mailing address listed on your account.

Tech's University Libraries seek user input about possible purchases of online resources; October, February, and April are the primary trial months.  Let us know how (if...) a trial fits the research, teaching/learning, and public service missions of the university.  Share your judgments through the short survey linked to each trial blurb and/or more detailed remarks in an email to a subject librarians.

All active trials are listed in a sidebar on the Databases A-Z guide, usually including their expiration dates and links to online user evaluation surveys.  Here I list current trials of likely interest to the departments I serve.