The Leadership and Democracy Lab Simple Research Guide
This is a simple guide to conducting preliminary research and furthering the understanding of particular country situations. This can help to aid in research methods and provide a starting point for further research methods.
This document is broken into three sections. The first section begins with basic research relating to the ProQuest database. The second section uses the United States’ Congressional database. The third section helps to build off of previous research and how to further research based on bibliographical references and possible further research leads.
Section One: Basic Research and ProQuest
- To begin, access the University of Western Ontario Library main homepage (www.lib.uwo.ca)
- From the Homepage, access the purple “Research” tab along the top row and select “Program Guides”
- From “Program Guides” select “Social Science,” then click “Political Science,” and then click “Political Science – International”
- From “Political Science - International” select “ProQuest Search – Political Science and Public Administration” enter your login information. If you are logging in using UWO’s access, find the “institution login” and enter the appropriate information (find University of Western Ontario, login name will be the same for other UWO accounts)
- From the main ProQuest page, click on “Advanced Search” above the main search box, this will lead you to an “Advanced Search” section with many different boxes
- Type in the keywords that pertain to the subject you are researching (for example, Mali Politics) and select the tab that should say “Anywhere” and change it to say “Abstract” (this will search the Abstracts from articles that usually relate the most to the subject you’re trying to find). Click “Search”
- From here, a list of documents will appear that relate to the subject of your desired topic. There are many filters on the right side of the page that include being able to select “Scholarly Journals,” “Peer Reviewed,” “Reports,” etc. and the “Publication Date” can also be selected for time relevant materials
- Click on the article that interests you, and it should help in your research. See “Section Three: Future Research” to learn more of how to advance from these articles
Section Two: Congressional Database
- To begin, access the University of Western Ontario Library main homepage (www.lib.uwo.ca)
- From the Homepage, access the purple “Research” tab along the top row and select “Program Guides”
- From “Program Guides” select “Social Science,” then click “Political Science,” and then click “Political Science – International”
- From “Political Science – International” select the tab titled “Government Information” (located along the sub-bar beside “Databases, Encyclopedias, etc.” Select “ProQuest Congressional Digital Collection”
- From here, you can search the desired topic either by using an “Advanced Search” and selecting the appropriate parameters or a simple “Search” using the “Search Bar”
- After clicking “Search” you can narrow your search by using the tools on the right hand side by limiting the “Date Range,” or selecting different styles of results
- The US Congress has many hearings on many issues and their reports can be found by selecting along the right hand side “Hearings Published;” OR CRS Report is the Congressional Research Services Reports which is a non-partisan part of Congress that researches materials for many topics and usually report on countries at least once per year
- Click on the article that interests you, and it should help in your research. See “Section Three: Future Research” to learn more of how to advance from these articles
Section Three: Future Research
- When selecting any type of research material, an easy indicator as to the quality of the article is to look at the bibliography and the other works and authors that the journal has used. These can be furthered researched if there is a passage in an article that is useful.
- When using the ProQuest tab, many articles will have a “cited by” tab that can lead you to further articles that are more current that have used the article in more recent or even more relevant articles
- As well, when using ProQuest, there is a “references” list on some articles that can lead you to the articles that this particular article has used and is an easy way to access bibliographical information
- When reading through articles, if a point interests you, follow it up by looking up the author in a simple Google Search, finding their works published lists, other articles or institutions that the author has participated in and from there, find further information and research about the topic you are researching
- With authors, if there is a pertinent question and they have provided an email address, email the person with the question, or email the Congressional Research Services for further help about a subject
- Use Think Tanks to your advantage. These groups constantly research new and diverse subject area and are often used in official documents (i.e. government) and peer-reviewed articles. A good start is to use the Harvard Think Tank Database and use these Think Tanks to further your research (Think Tanks: http://guides.library.harvard.edu/hks/think_tank_search)
- If you get frustrated with research, ask someone. Librarians are great for researching and have been trained to help with research methods. Professors and academics also have a large pool of knowledge to draw from, feel free to use them at your convenience!
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