Political science, governance, and international affairs: For graduate students, faculty

Cast wider nets to find scholarly literature

Find, apply, and emulate extended review essays on many topics.

Addressing research topics in broad scholarly domains, the essays in these series summarize trends and controversies in the literature, identifying key authors and works.

Oxford Handbooks Online Oxford Handbooks Online provides scholarly overviews of topics through in-depth articles. We have access to handbooks in Archaeology, Economics & Finance, Business Management, Political Science, Philosophy, Psychology, Music, Criminology and Criminal Justice, Physical Sciences, History, Literature, Neuroscience, Sociology, Classical Studies, Law, Linguistics, Religion, Social Policy and Social Work.
Annual Reviews Annual Reviews publishes comprehensive, critical, primary-literature reviews (HTML and PDF) for 40 scientific disciplines within the biological and medical, engineering and physical, and social sciences including economics. It is a useful starting point for upper level research because it synthesizes the vast amount of primary research literature and identifies the principal contributions in each field. 1939-present.
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Identify research resources from around the world.

Many times you will be able to locate copies in US libraries and borrow them at no charge using our ILLiad interlibrary loan system.

WorldCat
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The closest thing available to a full, global library catalog, OCLC WorldCat contains all the records cataloged by more than 10,000 OCLC member libraries, including Virginia Tech. WorldCat indexes billions of bibliographic records of books, journal articles, newspapers, magazines, computer programs, maps, musical scores, videotapes, and websites. Two flavors are available to VT users:
- WorldCat Firstsearch, aka "real WorldCat" to many faculty and librarians because it puts the greatest power in the user's hands. VT only.
- WorldCat.org, is fast and clean, and it includes a handy tool for locating what libraries hold an item near any ZIP code. Freely available.
This database bibliographic records also represent 400 languages, indexing material from:

Books
Journal articles
Websites and internet resources
Computer programs
Films and slides
Journals and magazines
Manuscripts
Maps
Musical scores
Newspapers
Videotapes, et cetera.

How-to guidance:

Literature reviews: an overview for graduate students (from NC State)

Follow the title link from the NCSU guide (and see the license and production credits) or click on the widget to watch on YouTube (which has intrusive advertising).
Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (from VT Libraries)

Video overview of the different kinds and purposes of comprehensive reviews of research literature. Follow the title link to see the full research guide from VT Library's evidence synthesis unit or click on the widget (inset toward the bottom) to watch on YouTube (which has intrusive advertising).

For instructors

Copyright and TEACH Act Resources (from Yale)
Handy guidance about what US permits about using physical and digital copies of copyrighted materials in teaching. From Yale University's office of general counsel.

VT thesis and dissertation guidance

ETD Guide for Virginia Tech grad students
One-stop source for a wealth of current information about Virginia Tech requirements and recommendations for doing electronic theses and dissertations. Guide address standard vs manuscript formats; VT policies & procedures for submissions; citation and copyright guidance; locating ETDs from Tech and elsewhere; awards for ETDs; and resources on publishers' responses to ETDs.
Find Virginia Tech Electronic Theses and Dissertations, in the VTechWorks institutional repository, whether born-digital or submitted on paper (pre-1997) and subsequently digitized. In some cases authors may impose restrictions on access.
- VT students are responsible for complying with university requirements before submitting their ETDs to the VTechWorks repository. As a repository, VT Libraries does not police the content of ETDs for validity or originality and does not run iThenticate similiarity reports.
Databases that index theses and dissertations

Find research funding

Funding Institutional from Elsevier
Funding Institutional allows researchers to search for grant opportunities and provides historical data about awards and related publications. This data can be used to select opportunities that are the best fit and tailor proposals based on past success. Additionally, users can track award trends, find potential collaborators, and improve their understanding of the competitive landscape. Searches can be narrowed down by location, special interest (limited submission, amount greater than $1M, deadline within three months, multidisciplinary, or foundation or private sponsor) and/or by subject area. It includes information on more than 11,000 funding bodies and more than 24,000 active opportunities. Use your vt.edu email address to register for an account.
This database is provided by the Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation.
Foundation Directory Online Search for information about over 100,000 foundations, corporate giving programs, and grantmaking public charities, or for information about nearly half a million grants. Parent organization, Foundation Center, also provides extensive free, online information about funding and managing nonprofit organizations. 2001-present.
Unique funder portfolios organize additional funder-specific content in one convenient location and include: grantmaker-related news, job opportunities, and Request For Proposals (RFPs); grantmaker-sponsored publications; and officer and trustee affiliations.

Foundation Directory Online Professional also provides exclusive funder-specific functionality: the ability to search across a funder's grants with customized search indexes; the ability to map a funder's grants for any given year by recipient type or primary subject and drill down to view disbursements by county, city, ZIP code, or congressional district; the ability to chart a funder's grants for any given year by recipient type or primary subject and drill down to view disbursements by secondary and tertiary category; the ability to sign up to receive funder-specific email alerts; and the ability to search across all four Foundation Directory Online databases as well as the Foundation Center's philanthropy news, nonprofit jobs, RFPs, foundation publications, and nonprofit literature databases simultaneously.

Its parent organization, Foundation Center, also provides extensive free,online information about funding and managing nonprofit organizations.

Research impact and scholarly publication

Virginia Tech's University Libraries supports participation in the scholarly conversation at every stage of the research life cycle, from planning to publishing (including journals and proceedings we host) to curation and archiving ... and even records management services to help university units comply with legal requirements and university policy.

Scholarly Communication Toolkit
Writing, citing, and publishing are part of the larger environment of scholarly communication. This comprehensive guide addresses scholarly publishing, authors' rights and copyright, broadening access to research outputs, research data management, open educational resources, digital humanities, and more. From the Association of College & Research Libraries.

Manage your professional identity and impact

Tell Your Story: Impact & Engagement (VT)
Highlights options for getting your work known, sharing it, and connecting with others. From Rachel Miles, Research Impact Librarian, VT Libraries.
Research impact guide (from Yale)
Thorough guide to ways for scholars to measure, represent, and broaden the impacts of their work. Libguide from Yale University Library, so links from the guide might may not be available to VT users even though Tech has the same resource.
Metrics Toolkit The Metrics Toolkit provides evidence-based information about research metrics across disciplines, including how each metric is calculated, where you can find it, and how each should (and should not) be applied. You’ll also find examples of how to use metrics in grant applications, CVs, and promotion dossiers.

Publish strategically

Think Check Submit
Simple video, with text, about steps in judging if a journal is an appropriate place for you to publish. Also handy reminders for judging if a journal at hand (or many other information sources) is something you would trust.
Author Rights
Guidance for academic authors about retaining their copyright in their articles
Why and how should you optimize academic articles for search engines? Tips to prepare your writing so can be found more readily on Google Scholar and many academic databases. See also: Jöran Beel and Bela Gipp and Erik Eilde. "Academic Search Engine Optimization (ASEO ): Optimizing Scholarly Literature for Google Scholar & Co." Journal of Scholarly Publishing 41, no. 2 (2010): 176-190. doi: 10.3138/jsp.41.2.176.
Perma.cc at Virginia Tech Prevent link rot when you cite a site in your research. VT Libraries is a registrar for Perma.cc, a service to provide archiving of web pages for research purposes. Researchers at Virginia Tech are able to archive, manage, and annotate an unlimited number of web pages with persistent shortlinks for citing, create multiple users with access to the same folders, and receive local support. Perma.cc is built by Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab, and in alignment with its focus on preservation, the service has a contingency plan and is also open source.