Starting Research in Sociology

Contact Librarian: Miriam Rigby, rigby@uoregon.edu; 346-7202

Finding Background Information ...

Encyclopedias and Dictionaries - for instance: Oxford's Dictionary of Sociology is an excellent resource for explanations of subjects from Althusser to Zeitgeist.

Annual Reviews in Sociology are review articles on various topics in Sociology written by scholars. These articles are great ways to get an overview of research on a topic as well as a reliable source of citations to important scholarship.

Looking for Articles ...

Sociological Abstracts provides access to citations and abstracts of scholarly research in Sociology.

Web of Science is an interdisciplinary index to articles in the sciences and social sciences, making it particularly useful for the multidisciplinary needs of Sociology researchers.

Looking for Datasets ...

Oxford Social Explorer contains millions of datapoints, collected from the US Census (1870-present), all American Community Surveys, Religious group information, Carbon Emissions data, and more for the United States. Data is presented as tables, downloadable files, and maps.

UO's Data Services Lab - Part of the Social Sciences Instruction Lab, they provide access to datasets as well as helping researchers with their own data management and analysis.
Statistical Information Guide - This guide to statistical information contains links and explanations of a number of good sources of data.

ICPSR: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research.
Census Data Use for researching characteristics of the U.S. population, down to very small areas (neighborhoods).
FedStats Use to find statistics from the 99 other federal statistical agencies.
UMichigan's Statistical Resources on the Web is a great compilation of (not too surprisingly) statistical resources.

Google's Advanced Search can be a great way to search for publicly available datasets if you know a few tricks:
- "Filetype:" – allows you to select a type of file such as Adobe PDF (pdf) or Microsoft Excel (xls) documents; publicly available articles are often in the PDF format; publicly available datasets are often in Excel format.
- "Site:" – allows you to search just within a particular website, or a section of a website. This is especially powerful when combined with a "filetype:" search

Citing your sources ...

You should cite everything! Even things that are "free on the internet" need to be attributed to their authors. Sociologists use the American Sociological Association Style Guide to format citations for papers. The Library offers an overview and samples of the ASA Citation style.

Maintained by: Miriam Rigby, rigby@uoregon.edu
Last Modified: 03/14/2012