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Economics

Library Resources for Department of Economics

Find literature

The UVa Library contains a wealth of information for economics research.  Please use the following tabs to identify and locate the resources you need:  ArticlesJournalsBooks

Starting with Google Scholar

Google Scholar helps you finds peer-reviewed articles, preprints, technical reports, books, theses, abstracts, and even patents and court opinions, from multiple sources.  These include academic publishers, university presses and repositories, professional societies, preprint repositories and the web. 

Change your Settings before you start:

Find sources that include those held by the UVA Library: 

  1. Click on Library Links. You can add up to 5 libraries. This allows your specified library to show a link icon if the content is available from that library.  
  2. Add "Open WorldCat - Library Search".  You'll be able to identify all of the libraries world-wide that have a specific resource.
  3. Add "University of Virginia Libraries".

Install the Google Scholar Button (a browser plug-in that adds a Scholar button to your toolbar and works with Chrome, Firefox and Safari):

  1. Click on the Button link (also found under Settings).
  2. Clicking the button will install its browser plug-in to your toolbar so you can find scholarly articles with the same search terms you are using on your regular google search. You will see a pop up window in the upper right with a list of the top 3 results and can then decide between expanding the page, going to a specific article, and downloading the citation. 

Finding recent papers - Your search results are normally sorted by relevance, not by date. To find newer articles, try the following options in the left sidebar:

  1. click "Since Year" to show only recently published papers, sorted by relevance;
  2. click "Sort by date" to show just the new additions, sorted by date;
  3. click the envelope icon to have new results periodically delivered by email.

Locating the full text of an article - Abstracts are freely available for most of the articles. Alas, reading the entire article may require a subscription. Here're a few things to try:

  1. click a library link, e.g., "FindIt@UVa", to the right of the search result;
  2. click a link labeled [PDF] to the right of the search result;
  3. click "All versions" under the search result and check out the alternative sources;
  4. click "Related articles" or "Cited by" under the search result to explore similar articles.

Getting better answers

  • If you're new to the subject, it may be helpful to pick up the terminology from secondary sources. E.g., a Wikipedia article for "overweight" might suggest a Scholar search for "pediatric hyperalimentation".

  • If the search results are too specific for your needs, check out what they're citing in their "References" sections. Referenced works are often more general in nature.

  • Similarly, if the search results are too basic for you, click "Cited by" to see newer papers that referenced them. These newer papers will often be more specific.

  • Explore! There's rarely a single answer to a research question. Click "Related articles" or "Cited by" to see closely related work, or search for author's name and see what else they have written.