Contextual Sources
When you have an idea for a research project, it is often helpful to place your questions within the context of the literature. Scholarly encyclopedias and bibliographies do just that. Of course you will also need to search the literature via article databases for "literature reviews" and research studies, but first see if your topic is covered by either of these sources.
The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics
Indepth articles that explain economic concepts, methods & historical developments and figures written by leading scholars.
Oxford Bibliographies (Oxford University Press) Tutorial
We subscribe to the following topics related to economics: International Relations, Islamic Studies, Latin American Studies, Management, Political Science and Psychology. Oxford bibliographies are designed to be starting points for research and offer peer-reviewed, annotated bibliographies.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance
Presents essays of 15-30 pages written by academic subject experts on a range topics including econometrics, economic thought, financial economics, health economics, public economics, economic theory and economic development.
Economic Article Databases: Best Bets
EconLit with Full Text (EBSCO)Indexes and abstracts journal articles, books, working papers, and dissertations in the field of economics based on the
Journal of Economic Literature's subject classification. Provides access to the full text of selected journals including all American Economic Association journals. Coverage goes back to 1886.
Google ScholarGoogle Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites.
Scholar search tipsScopus (Elsevier)Provides citations and abstracts to peer-reviewed journals, books, and conference proceedings in all major disciplines. Provides information on citing and cited references for each article.
Web of Science (Clarivate) Tutorial
Web of Science is a multidisciplinary database providing access to the following: Social Sciences Citation Index (1956-present) Conference Proceedings Citation Index- Social Science & Humanities (1990-present).
Other Useful Article Databases
Economics touches on many other fields of study, so you may benefit by searching the literature of related disciplines. Behavioral economics topics will be situated in the psychology literature. Industrial economics may be covered in the general business article databases and questions related to trade may be well indexed by political science databases. For a complete list of article databases by topic use our Subject Guides Top databases are listed below.
Articles
ABI/INFORM Collection (ProQuest)Provides access to scholarly journals, dissertations, working papers, key business and economics periodicals, and country- and industry-focused reports.
AGRICOLA (National Agricultural Library/USDA)Indexes materials acquired by the National Agricultural Library including books, journals, and government documents. Covers all aspects of agriculture and allied disciplines.
Business Abstracts with Full Text (EBSCO)Indexes business magazines and scholarly journals. Includes abstracts and selected full text. Coverage goes back to 1995.
Business Source Premier (EBSCO)Provides access to a wide range of academic business journals and trade magazines. Topics include management, marketing, finance, economics, and management information systems. Full text access may be embargoed for up to three years. Coverage goes back to 1965.
ERIC (EBSCO)Indexes and abstracts education journals, curriculum and teaching guides, conference papers, dissertations and theses, books, and Department of Education (ED) research reports. References for ED research reports often have links to the full text. Coverage goes back to 1966. The Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education.
FED in PrintWelcome to Fed in Print, the central catalog of publications of the US Federal Reserve System.
HeinOnlineProvides full text access to legal periodicals, books, government documents, legal texts, and other primary source collections in the legal field.
Subscription courtesy of the Charles Widger School of Law Library.
JSTORProvides a full text archive of academic journals and books in the humanities, social sciences, and mathematics. The most recent three to five years of a journal are usually not included.
MEDLINE (Web of Science, Clarivate)Search the Medline portion of PubMed. Citations export easily to EndNote.
NBER National Bureau of Economic Research"Founded in 1920, the National Bureau of Economic Research is a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization dedicated to promoting a greater understanding of how the economy works. The NBER is committed to undertaking and disseminating unbiased economic research among public policymakers, business professionals, and the academic community." Excellent source for working papers and datasets.
Nexis Uni Limitations on Use
Formerly known as LexisNexis Academic. Provides full text access to national and international newspaper and magazine articles and news transcripts, business, company, and industry information in the U.S. and abroad, and legal documents, including U.S. Federal and State court cases, and law reviews. Coverage varies.
Limitations on Use:
LexisNexis online services and the materials contained therein are under copyright by LexisNexis. All rights reserved. No part of these Services may be used except for research purposes, and the Services may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the LexisNexis Academic Library Solutions. Materials retrieved from the Services may not be duplicated in hard copy or machine-readable form without the prior written authorization of LexisNexis Academic & Library Solutions, except that limited reproduction of output is permitted solely for individual use by the Authorized User or internal distribution within the Subscribing Institution in accordance with the terms of this Agreement unless further limited or prohibited by the Copyright Act of 1976. Under no circumstances may the Materials or any portion thereof be used to create derivative products or services.
Provides citations and abstracts for journal articles, books, government documents, conference papers, research reports, etc. in the areas of public affairs, public and social policy, and international relations. International in scope. Formerly known as the Public Affairs Information Service.
PAISArchive [1915-1976]Retrospective database chronicling global public policy and social issues. Provides selective subject and bibliographical access to periodicals, books, hearings, reports, gray literature, government publications, and other English-language materials published around the world. Contains more than 700,000 records, originally published in the PAIS Bulletin, 1915-1976.
PsycINFO (ProQuest) Tutorial
Provides abstracts and indexing to journals, books, book chapters, technical reports and dissertations in all areas of psychology. This database is produced by the American Psychological Association (APA). International in scope; coverage is from 1887 to the present.
Social Science Research Network (SSRN) Limitations on Use
Offers abstracting and full text of working papers in a variety of social science fields. Composed of several specialized research networks, SSRN promotes rapid dissemination of early research results.
Limitations on Use:
You must have permission or rights to post content to SSRN.
Indexes and abstracts journals in many social science fields. Provides full text access to selected titles from 1972 to the present.
Sociological Abstracts (ProQuest)Indexes the literature of sociology and related fields. Includes citations to journal articles, dissertations, books, conference papers, and magazines. Offers abstracts and selected full text.
Data & Statistics
Despite or because of the ubiquity of data and statistics, finding good data to work with can be vexing. The following list of sources include open government data & proprietary subscribed data sets for browsing. A common way to identify relevant data is by a careful reading of the data sections in research papers. Databases that offer panel or time series data or simply index/abstract data are listed below.
Statistics
AidData"AidData collects, curates, and publishes data on more than $5.5 trillion dollars in development finance from 90 bilateral and multilateral agencies at the project level. All of this information is available in our searchable database of more than one million development finance activities".
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"The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) promotes a better understanding of the U.S. economy by providing the most timely, relevant, and accurate economic accounts data in an objective and cost-effective manner."
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Compiles surveys and statistics on employment, unemployment, prices, productivity, compensation, time use and spending to name a few.
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Data and publications from the most recent Economic Census and links to previous years.
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The Center for Economic Studies (CES) partners with stakeholders within and outside the Census Bureau to improve measures of the economy and people of the United States through research and the development of innovative data products. Public use data includes business dynamics, business formation, workforce indicators and origin destination employment statistics.
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Provides national, provincial, city, and regional data series including national accounts, prices, employment, income, industry, foreign trade, agriculture, construction, transportation, telecommunication, and education in monthly and annual time series.
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Includes reports, economic indicator data sets, and global macroeconomic time series for economists. Also features interviews and studies on leadership, compensation, organizational development, operations, globalization, diversity, sustainability, innovation and more for management and human resource development professionals. Coverage varies.
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Indexes data sets from a wide range of international data repositories and connects them with the scholarly literature to track data citations. Covers all disciplines from 1900 to the present.
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Data.gov increases the ability of the public to easily find, download, and use datasets that are generated and held by the Federal Government. Data.gov provides descriptions of the Federal datasets (metadata), information about how to access the datasets, and tools that leverage government datasets.
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Features a single unified platform delivering country and regional reports and comparable data for over 200 countries. Politics, economics, the business environment and sector and industries are explained and forecasts presented. The data tab delivers time series on national accounts, monetary, demographic, trade, employment, debt & spending indicators to name a few.
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"Eurostat is the Statistical Office of the European Communities. Its task is to provide the European Union with statistics at European level. By harmonising statistics from the European statistical system (ESS) to a single methodology, the statistics are made comparable"
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Provides government and proprietary data related to the business and the economy with graphing and mapping tools.
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Data releases on banks, exchange rates, money stocks, industrial activity, consumer finance, business finance, interest rates, and flow of funds.
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Provides access to nearly a century of U.S. public opinion data in the
Gallup Brain along with current recurring questions in
U.S. Dailies poll for national, state, select city and individual MSA levels and the
Gallup World Poll with global tracking data, social series and key indicators polling data. (World Poll questions may vary by year and country conditions.)
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Features historical data on worldwide stock exchanges, bond indices, intraday data, futures, interest rates, population, and much more. All data is clearly defined, easy to read, and can be readily exported into Excel.
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Authorized users (on and off campus) limited to current Villanova students, faculty and staff.
A compendium of statistics from over 1000 sources last updated in 1975 and has been expanded to include over 37,000 data series. Topics ranging from migration and health to crime and the Confederate States of America are each placed in historical context by a recognized expert in the field. The fully searchable and downloadable edition will permit users to graph individual tables and create customized tables and spreadsheets reflecting their own areas of interest.
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Provides access to archived social science data and data-driven learning guides designed for the classroom. Includes information about data management and curation services available to member institutions. See
Qualitative Data Repository for qualitative and multi-method data.
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A free ICPSR account is required to download data. The account must be created on campus. If you are having trouble accessing ICPSR data from off campus, please contact Nicole Daly at nicole.daly@villanova.edu for help.
Freely available datasets from the International Monetary Fund. Must register and login with individual account before downloading data.
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The ILO is a UN organization devoted to promoting fair working standards. It is a good source for reports and statistics on global employment trends and policy.
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List of international and national statistical agencies compiled by the Census Bureau
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Provides comparable, time series data by country and topic.
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Offers political, economic, and financial risk ratings and forecasts for 146 countries. Time series data covers 1985 through 2021. This is a downloadable file in Microsoft Excel format.
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Authorized users (on and off campus) limited to current Villanova students, faculty and staff.
Comparable purchasing power parity and national income accounts data for 188 countries.
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Offers a tool for mapping and analyzing U.S. national data on a wide variety of topics including education, income, employment, public health, crime, housing, transit, and more. Researchers can conduct demographic and socioeconomic analyses on a variety of geographic levels, from the national level to the neighborhood census block group as well as custom regions. Time series data covers 2000 to present.
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"The PGI dataset provides internationally comparable data for the Group of 20 economies (G-20) and the five members of the Financial Stability Board that are not part of the G-20 to facilitate the monitoring of economic and financial developments for these jurisdictions. Launched in 2009 in response to the global financial crisis, the PGI website is hosted by the IMF. It is a joint undertaking of the Inter-Agency Group on Economic and Financial Statistics (IAG). It provides information on major economic indicators that is available at participating international agencies covering financial, governmental, external, and real sector data, with links to data available at websites of international and national agencies."
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Open access collection of sports data from University of Michigan Economics professor, Rodney Fort.
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Provides access to maps and tables of U.S. Census and American Community Survey data from 1790 through most recently released data. Also includes datasets on election, health, crime, religion, and environmental topics, as well as some international data (UK Census 2011; Canadian Census 2011; selected Eurostat data; and World Development Indicators from the World Bank.) Create a free personal account in order to save your work.
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Site provides access to current 2012 PDF and past editions. Includes everything from government spending to the environment to communications. It is a most comprehensive one-volume reference source on the Nation's economic and social condition.
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Offers indexing, abstracting, and selected full text of statistical publications from U.S. state and federal governments, business and research institutes, and international material from the UN, OECD, EU, etc. Some tables are available in GIF, XLS, CSV, and other formats.
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This website provides free access to time series of economic indicators, bond yields, market indices, exchange rates and commodity prices for many countries.
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International time series data from the UN, IMF, World Bank, OECD on a easy to use platform designed by the U.K. Data Service
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Global statistical information on economics, demographic, social indicators, environment, energy and Millennium Development Goals.
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Offers a data research platform for business and economics datasets including AuditAnalytics, COMPUSTAT, CRSP, CBOE, Option Metrics, Risk Metrics, TAQ, TRACE, Thomson Reuters 13f, and others.
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Limitations on Use:
Authorized users (on and off campus) limited to current Villanova students and faculty.
Access and registration approved by rdavid.ratigan@villanova.edu of the Gmelich Lab for Financial Markets. You will need to get the DUO security app for 2 factor authentication.
Tutorial
DataBank is an analysis and visualization tool that contains collections of time series data on a variety of topics. You can create your own queries; generate tables, charts, and maps; and easily save, embed, and share them.
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Books
Video
HSTalks: The Business & Management CollectionContains multimedia lectures (typically 30-60 minutes), and case studies (usually brief and related to current developments) designed to augment teaching and learning across the business curriculum. Videos are segmentable and embeddable in course management systems. Provides access to peer reviewed, practice oriented journals.
LinkedIn LearningCourses and videos on range of professional development topics such as leadership, diversity, project management, marketing, finance, and software applications. Activate using Villanova single sign on. Access courtesy Villanova Human Resource & Career Center.
O'Reilly for Higher Education Tutorial
Access Instructions
Provides access to over 35,000 ebooks, 30,000 hours of video, curated learning paths, technology manuals, case studies, audio books, and videos covering fields ranging from software development, business, management, career development, engineering, design and more. Formerly known as Safari Books Online.
O’Reilly Media mobile app (iOS, Android & Amazon Fire) allows you to read online and off and syncs across devices. App is available on the
App Store or Google Play.
Country Economic Reports & Forecasts
ABI/INFORM Collection (ProQuest)Check off document type " country report" and type target country in location field.
Business Source Premier (EBSCO)Use publication type drop down to select "country report" and type target country in search box and limit to geography field.
EMIS Intelligence (Emerging Markets Information Service)Delivers company and industry information together with relevant news, research, and analytics for developing markets.
Economist Intelligence UnitFeatures a single unified platform delivering country and regional reports and comparable data for over 200 countries. Politics, economics, the business environment and sector and industries are explained and forecasts presented. The data tab delivers time series on national accounts, monetary, demographic, trade, employment, debt & spending indicators to name a few.
Mergent Online Limitations on Use
Use the country insight tab
Access limited to 4 simultaneous users.
Evaluating Journals and Articles
Journal metrics & rankings are imperfect but frequently used ways to gage the quality of research studies. The following tools publish journal level metrics such as impact factor, immediacy index,& H Index to name a few. For definitions and keys to understanding these metrics use the help links.
SJR Scimago
JCR Journal Citation Reports
Cabell's Directory of Publishing Opportunities
Peer reviewed research articles need to be evaluated for quality by considering the research methods, data used and analysis provided. Nonetheless metrics such as citation counts do suggest which papers are garnering attention. The following business databases offer article level metrics.
Scopus
Google Scholar
Web of Science (Clarivate)