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Sage Research Methods database is designed to support researchers with writing a research question, choosing a method, gathering and analyzing data, to and writing up & publishing the findings.
Other guides:
Definitions
- Research Paradigms, also known as worldviews, are the long-standing philosophical assumptions, principles, and tenets that guide particular and sometimes prescriptive protocol for systematic research that may differ by discipline. Examples include positivism/post-positivism, interpretivism/constructivism, critical theory, and pragmatism.
- Research methodology is a systematic process used to answer the research question. By studying the methodology in a research paper, you will understand the various procedures applied to solve the research problem and the reasoning behind them. The choice of which methodology to use will depend on your research questions. Methodology is the system of methods commonly referred to as quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods.
- Design refers to the assembly of choices for the techniques to be employed within a respective study that may include the research approach or paradigmatic tradition such as a quasi-experimental design in quantitative research or phenomenology in qualitative research.
- Methods are the systematic tools used to recruit, sample, collect, analyze, and/or interpret information. Think of methods as the tools and techniques used for data collection and analysis. There are more methods than listed in the illustration.
Other resources:
- When to Use What Research Design
- Interview Research in Political Science
- Doing research in political science an introduction to comparative methods and statistics
- Cambridge handbook of experimental political science
- Student guide to research in the digital age : how to locate and evaluate information sources
- Your research project: how to manage it
- The craft of research
- The essential guide : research writing across the disciplines
- Information skills : finding and using the right resources
- Research and writing in international relations
- InterViews : learning the craft of qualitative research interviewing
- Research methods in critical security studies : an introduction
- A political science student's practical guide
- A Student's Guide for Writing in Political Science
- Conducting your literature review
- Mining social media : finding stories in internet data
Sage Research Methods database is designed to support researchers with writing a research question, choosing a method, gathering and analyzing data, to and writing up & publishing the findings.
Explore the following guides:
- Think tanks
- Harvard Library focused on think tanks
- Google's Custom Search engine
- Grey Literature
Consult the News Guide for details of news sources.
Tips for searching newspaper databases.
Also check other publications by:
- IMF eLibrary
- World Bank -Open Knowledge Repository
- Unatied Nations e-library
- OECD iLibrary
- Alternative words to use instead of "policy": guideline, initiative, strategy, framework
- For the fullest information on government policy, it is often necessary to search across the full range of government publications.
- The Debates cover arguments for and against policies
- Statutes codify policies
- The Budget sets out fiscal policy
- The Public Accounts track the money spent to realize the policies
- Annual reports (of departments, of programs, on acts) track implementation of policies
- Statistics measure the impact of policies
- Audit reports evaluate policy effectiveness
- News releases announce new directions in policy
- Check the division of powers and responsibilities for different levels of government
- Find policy
Google custom searches for climate, economy, development, foreign policy, public policy, geographic pages and more. - Search globally for your policy topic:
- Policy Commons (Access to reports and documents from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), think tanks, government agencies, and educational institutions)
- Canadian Public Documents Collection (1996-2019) - Canadian public policy, health and medical research.
- Conference Board of Canada eLibrary - Centre for the North, Centre for Food in Canada, How Canada Performs, etc.
- Columbia International Affairs Online (CIAO)
- National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Working Papers
- Policy File Index - Indexes research in U.S. public policy.
- Think Tanks and Policy Centres
Develop a search statement to search databases (including news databases), the catalogue, and other academic sources
A search statement includes a list of keywords, combined using Boolean Operators (AND; OR; NOT)
- AND - this will combine concepts, all of which must be found in your list of results
- migration AND politics
- OR - either this concept or that concept (or both). This is helpful for generating a list of synonyms. Use synonyms to anticipate the different ways different authors may refer to the same idea. A thesaurus can be helpful for this
- internet OR web OR online
- NOT - do not include this concept
- migration NOT bird
- Mexico NOT city
- Quote marks - find a specific phrase
- "human rights"
- Truncation - any other combination of letters to follow
- Canad* - will find Canada, Canadian, Canadian's, etc.
Search engine OMNI located on the library home page, allows you to search across many of the library's collections simultaneously. Including books, ebooks, journal titles, games, music, videos, government information, maps, and more.
See also our list of recommended databases on the Public Affairs & Policy Management subject guide, which includes:
- PAIS Index
- Canadian Public Documents Collection
- Policy File Index
- Policy Commons
- Conference Board of Canada e-Library
- EconLit
- Worldwide Political Science Abstracts
- Scopus
- Taylor & Francis Journals Online
- Scholars Portal Journals
- Dissertations and Theses Global
Ebooks Collections
Help with eBooks
- Canadian Public Documents Collection
- Canadian University Press ebooks
- Cambridge University Press eBooks
- eBook Collection (EBSCOhost)
- Oxford University Press eBooks
- Springer eBooks
Journals
What is cited reference searching?
A simple and useful way of finding additional resources on your topic is to track citations backwards and forwards.
- Find a useful paper, check the reference list (these papers will have been published BEFORE your paper), AND
- Find the paper in one of the databases below, and check who has cited it (these papers will have been published AFTER your paper.
Cited reference searching, or citation analysis, also called citation tracking, is a way of measuring the relative importance or impact or an author, article, or publication, by counting the number of times that author, article, or publication has been cited by other works.
There are a number of tools available; however, no single database covers all works that cite other works. Searching across several databases is necessary to ensure complete coverage.
Why is this important?
- keeping track of how many times and where a publication is begin cited can help you gage the impact that article has in your discipline
- if the article has been cited, the database will provide a link to the citing article/author
- to locate current research based on earlier research
- to find out how a particular research topic is being used to support other research
- to track the history of a research idea
- to track the research history of a researcher
OMNI
Use our main search tool, OMNI to do cited reference searching. Click on these icons 
to either "find sources cited in this" OR "find sources citing this".
Use our Cited Reference Searching page to find out which of the big databases allow you to do this and how to do this.
