Science and technology studies: Policy and law resources

Tools for searching the main disciplinary literatures STS draws on.

Think tanks, policy papers, "gray literature"

Professors and other people with advanced academic degrees present their expertise in other settings beside peer-reviewed journals and scholarly books.  They may produce reports and analyses for governments, non-profit organizations, corporations, and all sorts of research institutes; they also distribute research for comment at academic conferences.  While these sources are often created with academic rigor, they commonly do not go through full peer review before publication.  Nonetheless, especially regarding recent events and hot topics in politics and policy, such "gray literature" can be important bridges between journalism and traditional academic publications. 

Legal databases

US federal government information sources

By law, the US Government Publishing Office is the "official, digital, and secure source for producing, protecting, preserving, and distributing the official publications and information products of the federal government," making it the world's largest publisher. 

Most GPO publications have been published online since the late 1990s and are listed in our library's Discovery Search (Primo) catalog. For most of a century, Virginia Tech automatically received most GPO output in print "docs," identified by GPO's unique "SuDoc" call number system ... but didn't catalog most of them.

The SuDoc number is crucial for getting your hands on physical government publications in the library (Newman Library 5th floor), from library storage, or via ILLiad.  Most of our printed  federal publications are arranged by SuDoc number on the 5th floor of Newman Library. Don't be reluctant to ask a librarian for help.

Extensive digitization of older documents has been done by government agencies, by commercial database vendors (Voxgov, HeinOnline, ProQuest, Readex), and by nonprofits (LLMC-Digital, HathiTrust, Internet Archive).  Many of those digitized documents remain invisible to Discovery Search but can be located and read on those prodivers platforms.  (See the library's Databases A-Z directory.  

Records in the GPO catalog and Voxgov databases should provide SuDoc class numbers back to the 1970s-80s. For earlier SuDoc numbers, GovInfo.gov provides PDF indexes of  US government documents, notably the Monthly Catalog of U.S. Government Publications, 1895-2004. Those PDFs are cumbersome to work with; you might might find it faster to use the print indexes shelved near the Docs stacks (start at call no Z1223 .A183) to find citation and SuDoc information to request documents from VT storage or ILLiad.