General resources in the social sciences

American Statistics Index.

Washington: Congressional Information Service, 1974–. A useful index to statistics that are buried within government publications. The online version, called Statistical Masterfile or LexisNexis Statistical, contains some links to full texts. It is searchable by keyword, subject, author, title, agency, or year and can be limited by demographic, geographic, or other variables.

Social Sciences Citation Index.

Philadelphia: Institute for Scientific Information, 1956–. An interdisciplinary database covering more than 1,700 journals in the social sciences. Search by author, keyword, or cited source, a good way to trace the influence of a particular work. Part of the Web of Knowledge, this database also offers a powerful Related Records search, which identifies articles that cite one or more of the same sources.

Social Sciences Index.

New York: Wilson, 1974–. An interdisciplinary index to over 600 key journals in the social sciences, including anthropology, psychology, sociology, economics, and political science. In some libraries, the database includes the full texts of selected articles.

FedStats

http://www.fedstats.gov. A well-organized portal for statistical information available from more than 100 U.S. government agency sites. Statistics can be searched by keyword or browsed by topic or agency. Links to downloadable data sets are included.

Internet Crossroads in Social Science Data

http://www.disc.wisc.edu/newcrossroads/index.asp. Offers more than 800 annotated links to online data sources. Searchable by keyword or browsable by category, the site includes links to government and nongovernment sites concerned with domestic and international economics and labor, health, education, geography, history, politics, sociology, and demography. The site is maintained by the Data and Program Library Service at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Intute Social Sciences

http://www.intute.ac.uk/socialsciences. A selective catalog of thousands of Web sites in the social sciences, hosted in the United Kingdom. Users can browse by topic and region or search by keyword. Each entry has been reviewed and is annotated. The focus is on high-quality sites that provide information directly rather than just link to other sites. It is an excellent resource for international social sciences data.

U.S. Census Bureau

http://www.census.gov. Offers access to an astounding amount of demographic, social, and economic data. The search engine can pinpoint relevant statistical tables and reports. The site is updated almost daily with newly released reports.

The Gallup Poll.

Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1972–. An annual print compilation of opinion poll statistics gathered by the Gallup organization from 1935 to the present.

Historical Statistics of the United States: Earliest Times to the Present.

Ed. Susan B. Carter. Rev. ed. 5 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Offers vital statistics, economic figures, and social data for the United States over time; it includes a subject index. For more recent figures, consult the latest volume of the Statistical Abstract of the United States.

International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences.

Ed. Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes. 26 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2001. A vast compendium of scholarly articles on topics in the social sciences. International and interdisciplinary in perspective, this work is particularly useful for its cross-references among related topics.

International Historical Statistics, 1750–2000: Europe.

By B. R. Mitchell. 5th ed. New York: Palgrave, 2003. Offers time-series data for European countries, including figures on population, agriculture, the economy, transportation, communications, and education. Other volumes by the same author cover different regions of the world.

The Social Sciences: A Cross-Disciplinary Guide to Selected Sources.

Ed. Nancy L. Herron. 3rd ed. Englewood: Libraries Unlimited, 2003. Provides information about the most important tools for social sciences research, with essays describing the structure of each discipline’s literature.

Statistical Abstract of the United States.

Washington: Government Printing Office, 1879–. Perhaps the single most useful collection of statistical information available in a small package. It includes hundreds of tables with figures on areas such as population, economics, and social factors as well as references to the original sources. An index provides easy access. Statistical abstracts from 1995 to the present are available on the Web at http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab.