UO Libraries Home Page

Public Policy Research with Government Documents:
a Few Starting Places

  • What is your specific question or topic? Write it out.
  • Locate some recent articles and learn the basic facts. Use a general periodical index like Academic Search Elite, or consult a journal like Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report. At this point you may want to narrow or refine your question.
  • Is yours a domestic issue primarily handled at the national level? If so, follow some or all of these steps:
    • Identify the relevant agencies, using the Federal Staff Directory or the U.S. Government Manual.
    • Locate relevant laws, using the U.S. Code. There may also be relevant constitutional provisions.
    • Locate relevant government programs, using the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance.
    • Locate relevant regulations, using the Code of Federal Regulations, and following clues from steps a, b, and c.
    • Identify recent bills using an online source, such as GPO Access or Thomas, or the print Congressional Index.
    • Locate congressional hearings and other floor debate, using Lexis-Nexis Congressional and the Congressional Record.
    • Locate relevant case law (court opinions), using the resources of the Law Library.
    • Locate federal agency documents, using the Government Printing Office's database, available on CD-ROM in the Documents Department. Publications issued since 1996 may be found in the UO online catalog.
    • Consult the Documents Department's reference guide, "Public Policy Research: Federal Documents".
  • Is yours a foreign policy issue? Consult recent issues of Dispatch, the State Department's weekly policy journal and the Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents. These are indexed in Expanded Academic Index, on Janus. Check other sources listed on the Documents Department's reference guide, "U.S. Foreign Policy".
  • Is your policy issued handled at the state level (most criminal matters, and many social issues such as adoption, property taxes, and gambling)? If so, will you be focusing only on Oregon, or looking at other states as well?
    • For Oregon laws, check the Oregon Revised Statutes. Regulations are in the Oregon Administrative Rules. Cases from the Oregon Supreme Court are in Oregon Reports. All of these, as well as copies of legislative bills, are in the Documents Department. Consult the reference guide, "Oregon Documents".
    • Identify relevant agencies using the Oregon Blue Book
    • Investigate the web pages of relevant agencies, through the State of Oregon's web site.
    • For laws of other states, consult sources listed on the reference guide, "State Laws: Sources of Information".
    • For newspaper coverage of Oregon issues and events consult the electronic version of the Oregonian, the Oregon Index (an index to articles in several Oregon newspapers), and the web-based index to the Eugene Register-Guard. All may be found through the UO Library's web page. The newspapers themselves are in the library's Microforms Collection.
  • Do you want to support your investigation with statistics?

Return to top

Maintained by: Ted D. Smith, tedsmith@uoregon.edu
Last Modified: 07/26/2006