Economics Library Portal: Students
Welcome!
Welcome to the Economics library portal. The portal provides quick links to the resources you need to succeed in your course. Whether you are online or on-Grounds, UVA Library services and support are available to all students.
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Writing with AI
Generative AI can serve as an editor, assistant, and organization tool ensuring that you can focus on the writing process. It cannot replace your voice or critical analysis of a topic. Explore a variety of AI support tools until you find one that works for you and remember that tool capability is updated all the time so continue learning and experimenting. The tool you use for this week’s project today may not be the best one to use for the next project.
*The information below was distributed to students at the AI Tools Expo in April 2025.
When AI Works
Breaking down a complex project: Many AI tools can identify project phases and propose timelines to help you organize the time you spend on a project.
Ideating: Use AI to brainstorm, deepen your understanding of a subject, choose or narrow a topic, keyword generation, and to explore new angles.
Outlining: Use AI to organize your thoughts, logically order concepts, group related ideas, and improve flow.
Editing and proofreading: Once you have a draft, AI can help identify areas for improvement, like consistency in tone, style, and language, sound sentence structure, and act as an editor.
When AI Doesn't Work
Deep research: AI can hallucinate sources, provide biased and incorrect information, and misrepresent material. It does not have access to UVA’s databases.
Drafting and analysis: AI limits the opportunities to improve your own writing and critical thinking. Your unique voice and independent thinking are what makes your writing authentically yours.
Citing sources: If you use AI to create citations, be sure to double check formatting and accuracy.
Search for academic articles
Academic databases contain peer-reviewed articles, scientific papers, reports, and more. These are the most used databases for Economics research:
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ABI/INFORM Global This link opens in a new windowABI/INFORM Global offers the latest business and financial information for researchers at all levels. It allows users to research business conditions, management techniques, business trends, management practice and theory, corporate strategy and tactics, and competitive landscape.
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Business Source Complete This link opens in a new window
Topics such as marketing, management, MIS, POM, accounting, finance and economics. Find articles plus financial data, books, book digests, conference proceedings, case studies, market, industry, and country reports, company profiles, and SWOT analyses.
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Data Axle Reference Solutions This link opens in a new windowData Axle Reference Solutions (formerly ReferenceUSA) provides numerous databases for business and consumer research. It offers access to over 20 million businesses and 222 million consumers.
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EconLit This link opens in a new windowInternational coverage of economics in journal articles, books, dissertations, book reviews.
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Euromonitor Passport This link opens in a new windowThis online market research tool monitors industry trends and provides strategic analysis and a market size and market share database for products across key countries.
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Factiva This link opens in a new windowCompany and business information from Dow Jones; articles from over 6,000 newspapers and periodicals plus news photographs. Select "News pages" to browse daily issues of recent newspapers from many countries; use "Search" to find older articles. Access, provided through VIVA Consortium, is limited to 70 concurrent users.
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IBISWorld This link opens in a new windowIBIS World provides insight into America's 700+ industries through accurate and current business information focused on economic, demographic and government data.
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ICPSR This link opens in a new windowThe Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) provides a vast archive of social science data for research and instruction. Users may view documentation, download raw data, and search a bibliography of data-related literature. (You must create a personal ICPSR account with your virginia.edu email address in order to download data.)
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NBER Working Papers This link opens in a new windowNational Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) researchers initially report their findings in scientific papers aimed at other professional economists in this searchable database. Nearly 700 NBER Working Papers are published each year.
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SSRN: Social Science Research Network This link opens in a new windowSocial Science Research Network (SSRN) is devoted to the rapid worldwide dissemination of social science research and is composed of a number of specialized research networks in each of the social sciences. The SSRN eLibrary consists of two parts: an Abstract Database containing abstracts on over 542,600 scholarly working papers and forthcoming papers and an Electronic Paper Collection currently containing over 445,100 downloadable full text documents in Adobe Acrobat pdf format.
Locate resources by program
Search Virgo
Download research software
- UVA Software Gateway
- UVA Learning Tech
- UVA Zoom Home
- Zotero (Citation Manager)