LibGuides: Economics: Getting Started

Related Research Guides

Business Research
Company and Industry Research
Economists' Papers Archive: Manuscript and archival collections in the Rubenstein Library
Trade Data: Overview of sources and coding schemes
UN Comtrade: Country-to-country commodity-level trade data
U.S. Economic Data: From US government agencies

Classes

Key Literature Indexes and Collections

EconLit with Full Text This link opens in a new window
Index of academic literature back to the 19th century (articles, books, working papers, conference papers, and reports).
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Full text online of all issues of important core journals (with a 3-5 year lag) back to 19th century, including many in economics, finance, statistics, and business.

Journal of Economic Literature (JEL)
Besides articles, includes extensive book reviews, an annotated list of new books, table of contents of current periodicals, and selected abstracts of articles.
NBER Working Papers
Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research)
RePEc
RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) is a collaborative effort volunteers worldwide to enhance the dissemination of research in Economics and related sciences. The heart of the project is a decentralized bibliographic database of working papers, journal articles, books, books chapters and software components, all maintained by volunteers.
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Good to track down working papers. RePEc records are also included in EconLit.

PAIS Index This link opens in a new window
Indexes public policy literature back to 1915, including articles, government documents, and grey literature.
ERIC (EbscoHost) This link opens in a new window
Articles and reports on education, including economic and policy aspects.
Sociological Abstracts This link opens in a new window
Search for international literature in sociology and related social and behavioral sciences disciplines
TRID - the TRIS and ITRD Database This link opens in a new window
Indexes transportation-related research (primarily engineering, but also a lot of economics/policy research). Combines the records from TRB's Transportation Research Information Services (TRIS) Database and the OECD's Joint Transport Research Centre’s International Transport Research Documentation (ITRD) Database.
Web of Science This link opens in a new window
Good for following citations (material cited by an author, plus later articles that cite that work).
Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
Set preferences to "Duke University Libraries": choose Settings, then Library Links. You'll have the "Get It @ Duke" link in your search results.
ABI/INFORM Collection This link opens in a new window
Business and economic literature index, including many trade publications and market research report as well as academic literature. From ProQuest.
Business Source Complete This link opens in a new window
Business and economic literature index, including many trade publications as well as academic literature. From EBSCO.
Political Risk Yearbooks provide probability forecasts for political, social and economic trends for 100 countries, and are included in Business Source Complete since 2003. In the "Publication" field in the Advanced Search, search for Political Risk Yearbook and the name of the country.

Recommended Databases for Economics
Longer list of online indexes, collections, and data sources.

Online Reference Works

New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics Online This link opens in a new window

Annual Reviews This link opens in a new window

Key Data Sources

FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data)
Includes FRED, with 40,000 economic time series; ALFRED,with archival (unrevised) time series; FRASER, with historical US federal govt. economic publications; and several other components. From the St. Louis Fed.
NBER Data
Wide variety of socioeconomic datasets from the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Global Financial Data This link opens in a new window
A collection of financial and economic data provided in ASCII or Excel format, such as stock market indexes, interest rates, and exchange rates. Especially useful for very long time series and international coverage. Requires creating a login (free for Duke users).
World Bank Data Catalog This link opens in a new window
Empirical data and development-related indexes from the World Bank.
IMF E-Library This link opens in a new window
Contains International Financial Statistics (IFS) and other IMF databases and books.
UNdata This link opens in a new window
Includes major UN databases and those of several related IGO's.
UN Comtrade This link opens in a new window
Detailed commodity-level trade data from the UN Statistics Division.
OECD iLibrary This link opens in a new window
Full text of OECD publications since 1998, plus key statistical databases such as ITCS and those from the IEA.
ProQuest Statistical Insight This link opens in a new window
Indexes government, IGO, and privately published sources of empirical data. Some full text online, or on microfiche in Perkins Public Documents collection.