ECON 4905

Scholarly databases often have a specific disciplinary focus or they are considered interdisciplinary and may cover many disciplines. Academic articles often go through a peer-review process.

On this page:

• Discipline Specific Databases
• Interdisciplinary Databases
• Citation Chaining
• Tips for Journal Article Searching
• Evaluating Journal Quality

Discipline Specific

• Business Source Complete
• EconLit - Economics
• Emerald Management eJournals
• PAIS (Public Affairs Information Service)
• PsycINFO - Psychology related database often used for organizational behaviour.
• Subject Specific Library Guides - A collection of guides maintained by the MacOdrum Library Staff. They will point you to resources used by specific disciplines.

Interdisciplinary

• OMNI - Search most content in the library. Including Journal articles and books.
• Google Scholar
• Web of Science
• Scopus

Good to know:

• Within a database, limit your search to scholarly articles when it is appropriate to disregard other resources.
• Never limit to full-text only as we may subscribe to the journal you find from another vendor. Use the Get it! icon to search for the full text when it is not immediately available.
• Examine the keywords on the record for additional search terms.

Citation Chaining

Find articles by following citations. Some databases will allow you to find articles that are cited in your article of interest or articles that cite your article of interest. If you found an article that matches your topic the databases below will help you find research that cited that article.

• OMNI
• Google Scholar
• Web of Science
• Scopus

Working Papers are written by economic researchers but have not gone through the peer review process. This does not mean that they are incomplete, Working Papers are used to share ideas as they are cohesive and very current resources.

You can find these types of papers in certain databases like:

CEPR Discussion Papers

NBER Working Papers

Useful titles

Here are some useful titles you can use to help you:

• The student's guide to writing economics​
• Writing public policy: a practical guide to communicating in the policymaking process
• Show me the numbers: Designing tables and graphs to enlighten
• The Wall Street journal guide to information graphics: the dos and don'ts of presenting data, facts, and figures

Owl Purdue

Use the excellent resource OWL - Purdue University's Online Writing Lab.
Under Academic Writing, explore:

• Essay Writing: defines and outlines the structure of
  • Expository essays
  • ​Descriptive essays
  • Narrative essays
  • Argumentative (Persuasive) essays
• The Writing Process
  • Creating a Thesis Statement
  • Developing an Outline
  • Quoting, Paraphrasing and Summarizing

Citing your sources

It is essential to understand how and when to use citations in your essays and projects to ensure the Academic Integrity of your work. Good help is available!

• Research and Citation - Guides to citation styles from OWL.

Citing Your Sources - Carleton's general guide to resources on all the main styles including video links.

Citation Management Tools like Mendeley and Zotero will help automate the process of inserting citations and creating a bibliography. These tools also help you to organize your research resources and collaborate throughout a project. The decision to use a citation manager should be made at the beginning of a research project.

Carleton University Citation Management Resources

Other Citation management Guides

• Zotero Guide - TMU
• Zotero Guide - U of T
• Mendeley - TMU
• Mendeley - U of T

The worksheet for the activities that are part of the library session can be found below: