Mount Holyoke College Library

Economics 213
Suggested resources

Using the Five College Library Catalog

• Includes the books, journals, videos, and other media owned by the libraries in the Five Colleges.
  
• Search by author or title for "known" items, publications you have identified using bibliographies or indexes (more on that below)
  
• Search by subject. For example:
  

  [COUNTRY NAME] -- ECONOMIC CONDITIONS -- [TIME PERIOD]
  [COUNTRY NAME] -- ECONOMIC POLICY -- [TIME PERIOD]
  ECONOMIC ASSISTANCE -- [COUNTRY NAME]
  INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND -- [COUNTRY NAME]
  STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT (ECONOMIC POLICY) -- [COUNTRY NAME]
  WORLD BANK -- [COUNTRY NAME]
  
  To broaden the search, search by the region as well as the individual country name.

  The UMass library owns a very good set called Country Reports/Country Profiles, published by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Search by title, e.g. country report colombia. Country Reports are published quarterly; Profiles are published annually. (Remember that the UMass catalog is separate from the Four Colleges.)

Using indexes to identify journal articles

Econlit
The major resource for Economics and the online version of the Journal of Economic Literature (JEL), Econlit includes citations to journal articles, books, chapters of books, dissertations.

Agricola
Produced by the National Agriculture Library, Agricola is a very useful source for economic information on developing countries; includes references to books, articles, research reports.

PAIS
An excellent database for information on foreign countries. Includes citations to books, articles, chapters of books, government documents, publications from international organizations.

Social Sciences Abstracts
A multidisciplinary bibliographic index to a range of periodicals in the social sciences. International in scope,the database includes citations from 400 periodical titles.

Social Sciences Citation Index
The database indexes over 1,725 social science journals spanning 50 disciplines. Including the bibliography of most articles indexed, users can follow the cited references of one article to locate additional relevant sources.

Lexis Nexis
A service that provides full text of articles in newspapers and some popular magazines. Useful for finding very recent information. Articles tend to include more "reporting" and less "analysis."

Note: In some cases, the index will indicate if Mount Holyoke owns the journal. If not, you will need to search the Five College Library catalog.

Resources on the Internet

Finding resources on the Internet is easiest if you have a specific web address (for example, www.imf.org). To search across the internet for resources on a topic is more challenging. Here are a few tips to keep in mind:

• Read the Help files
  
• Be specific
  
• Unlike library catalogs which include broad subject headings that aim to bring like things together, search engines look for words wherever they appear in a document. Think about your interest and then consider what words someone writing about this topic might include.
• Use synonyms to broaden your search.
• Use more than one search engine

For more tips on searching, see Using the Internet.

For tips on evaluating what you find on the web, see:

• Hammett, Paula. Evaluating Web Resources.
  
• Milton's Web: Evaluating Information Found on the Internet.
  

9/99; revised 9/01