Starting Research in Sociology

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

Encyclopedias and dictionaries are a useful place to gather background information on your topic.

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

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.

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.
Statistical Resources on the Web, out of the University of Michigan. This is a somewhat clunky website, but can be extremely useful as it is regularly updated and full of links to statistical sources on the internet.
Google is a great search engine to use for searching for publically available datasets. Use Advanced Search
- "Filetype:" – allows you to select a type of file such as Adobe PDF (pdf) or Microsoft Excel (xls) documents; publically available articles are often in PDF formal, publically 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

Maintained by: Miriam Rigby, rigby@uoregon.edu
Last Modified: 10/23/2009