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Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy & Technology: 84-250 Writing for Political Science and Policy: Finding scholarly research

This guide provides links to resources useful for conducting library research, writing literature reviews and finding background information to inform policy briefs, white papers and other type of policy writing.

CIRP Journal

 

CIRP Journal Logo

 

CMU's Center for International Relations and Politics sponsors the CIRP Journal a print and online journal containing the work of undergraduate and graduate students on international relations and political science research. 

Google Scholar

Google Scholar Search

You can set up a link from Google Scholar to CMU Libraries' catalog to make connecting to full text resources easier. For more information, see the Libraries Google Scholar Links page.

Dissertations & Theses

Dissertations and theses can be rich sources of relevant resources and scholarly literature, as well as provide detailed research methodology. You can find the full text of dissertations and theses in the Dissertations & Theses Global Database.

Foreign Policy Research

For a detailed guide on resources useful in foreign policy, visit the Foreign Policy Research Guide

Government Documents

For a detailed guide on finding government documents, visit the Government Documents Research Guide.

Multidisciplinary databases

Policy and Political Science Research Databases

Other Subject Databases

Searching Databases

Boolean SearchingMost databases allow the use of AND, OR and NOT to broaden or narrow and search. 

  • AND will narrow the search to include only records with both terms. 
  • OR with broaden the search to include records with either term.
  • NOT will narrow the search to exclude records with one of the terms.

 

Truncation:  You can use an * at the end of a word stem to broaden your search to include related terms.  For example, to search for child, children or childhood use the search term child*

 

Putting quotes "" around words allows you to search for a phrase.  For example, searching language development, without quotes, finds records with both the word 'language' and 'development' somewhere in the record.  Searching "language development", with quotes, only find records with the phrase "language development".

 

Example: How does bilingualism affect language development in children?

 

 

NOTE:  When you begin doing advanced searching in a new database, look for the Help or Information sections to determine how that database works, and how it may differ from other databases with which you are familiar.

The value of citation searching

Schematic showing backward and forward citation searching

An excellent way of discovering new and relevant resources is to use the articles that you have already identified as important works in you search.  The articles and resources in the references or bibliography can point you to other relevant sources that were published prior to the article of interest. 

But how do you find more recent articles that have used and cited the article of interest in their work?

 

Web of Science is a database of scholarly literature that also tracks citations and allows citation searching.  In the search results window you can:

Screenshot of Web of Science search results indicating sorting option and link to Times Cited