What's Scholarly and What's Popular?

A snazzy video made by librarians at Wayne State University in Michigan on how to differentiate between scholarly and popular sources.

Library Databases for Political Science

Journal articles provide you with the latest research in your field. The research databases below will provide you with both scholarly and popular journal articles in political science.

What's the difference between scholarly and popular articles?

Law Reviews

Law reviews are the scholarly articles of the legal world. These publications present the analysis of legal issues. Most law reviews are written by law professors and practicing attorneys, along with some student work. Law reviews present new theory and doctrine; intensive analysis; comprehensive documentation; opinion and dialog*.

Lexis Nexis is the best tool for finding Law Reviews at CSUSM. Follow these steps to find law reviews:

1. Starting with Lexis Nexis Academic, choose US Legal on the left side of the screen, and then choose Law Reviews
2. Enter your search terms and be sure to change the drop box to At Least 5 Occurances to ensure that your words are prominent in the article.
   • You can limit your search to specific areas of the law such as Constitutional Law or Immigration Law.
3. Review the results for relevant articles
   • Look mainly for articels labeled ARTICLES, because OPINIONS or NOTES may be written by law school students.

* Taken from Charles N. and Hilda H. M. Mason Law Library, University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law

Literature Review

Example literature review

What is a literature review?

A literature review is not research, it is a review of the research that has been done on your topic.

A literature review is NOT just a summary, but a conceptually organized synthesis of the results of your search. It must

• organize information and relate it to the thesis or research question you are developing
• synthesize and critically analyze the results comparing and contrasting their findings
• identify controversy and themes that appear in the literature

A literature review is a piece of discursive prose, not a list describing or summarizing one piece of literature after another. It's usually a bad sign to see every paragraph beginning with the name of a researcher. Instead, organize the literature review into sections that present themes or identify trends, including relevant theory. You are not trying to list all the material published, but to synthesize and evaluate it according to the guiding concept of your thesis or research question. (From Univ. of Toronto)

Check out these sites for more help understanding literature reviews

• How to ... Write a Literature Review, UC Santa Cruz Library
• The Literature Review: A few tips on conducting it, University of Toronto
• How to do a Literature Review, North Carolina A&T State University

Tips on conducting research for a literature review

• Use bibliographies and reference pages of articles to direct your research. You may start to see some trends with the people who are writing about your topic. Check the bibliography for more articles about your topic.
• Use the authors who you have found to be writing on your topic as starting points. Look for additional articles, and rebuttals, retractions or responses to their research

Use this chart to track articles you read for your literature review:

• Google Spreadsheet
• Word Document
• PDF

Why cite?

• To give credit where credit is due;
• So your reader (professor) can get the source that you mentioned in your assignment;
• To add credibility to your research - shows you did the work;
• Avoid plagiarism.

Learn more about writing citations and avoiding plagiarism by visiting these websites:

• Oops, I plagiarized, from UCLA's Bruin Success with Less Stress
• Research Tutorial: Citing Your Sources

APA Style Guide

As you write your paper, you'll need to cite passages and ideas from the sources you've found. Check with your professor which style is preferred for this assignment.

Documenting Sources for the Social Sciences (Diana Hacker)
From Research and Documentation Online, this site offers help on writing in-text citations, list of references and the manuscript format.

apastyle.org
Produced by the APA, this site contains a wealth of information about APA citation style. It is not a replacement for owning the Publication Manual, though.

APSA Style Guide

As you write your paper, you'll need to cite passages and ideas from the sources you've found.  In order to cite your resources properly, you need to follow the style guide used by political science scholars.

You can use KnightCite as a starting point for APSA (start with Chicago), but it will need to be revised.

2012 Electoral College Project

This guide is intended to give you a starting point for your research for the Electoral College Project. Below, you will find links to tools that I think will be most useful for your assignment. If at any point, you get stuck in your research, please contact me to set up a research appointment.

City/State Data

To complete this assignment, you will need specific information about cities/states around the nation. 

U.S. Census: The Census will be your starting point for this assignment. In addition to basic population information, you'll also find inofmration about education, income and businesses in the geographic area you are studying.

• Economic Census: This subset of the Census provides detailed information about business and industry in your location.

Voting and election information

Secretary of State: The SOS is the office responsible for elections in a given state. You should be able to get information about voting laws and election info for any state from their Secretary of State website. You may also find past election results and information about the upcoming election. You will also find electoral college E.g. California Secretary of State and California's Electoral College information.

Registrar of Voters: This office is responsible for registering voters in a county, and running local elections. You may find past election information and local information about elections. E.g San Diego County Registrar of Voters

Library Databases for News

Use these databases to search across newspapers and news magazines. To access the full-text of the article, look for the "Get Text" button.

Database	Full Text	Coverage
Lexis Nexis Academic Provides access to a wide range of news, business, legal, and reference information.		1975→current
Academic Search Premier (EbscoHost) Our most popular database. Covers a wide array of subjects with full text for nearly 1,850 scholarly journals, including more than 1,250 peer-reviewed titles.	+	1984→current
Ethnic NewsWatch Full-text ethnic newspapers, searchable in English or Spanish.		1992→current
PAIS An important index to political, economic, and social issues in current debate.		1972→current
ProQuest Newspapers Includes coverage of over 300 major U.S. and international newspapers, such as The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune.		1970→current

If you are looking for news media in a specific location, try ABYZ News Links. You'll find links to different types of news media for states and cities around the county.