Researching in Sociology

Contact Librarian: Miriam Rigby, rigby@uoregon.edu;
                               (541) 346-7202

Articles (Scholarly / Peer-reviewed)

• Sociological Abstracts provides access to citations and abstracts of scholarly research in Sociology.
• Web of Science is an interdisciplinary index to articles in the sciences and social sciences, making it particularly useful for the multidisciplinary needs of Sociology researchers.

• Encyclopedias and dictionaries by subject.
  For instance: Oxford's Dictionary of Sociology is an excellent resource for explanations of subjects from Althusser to Zeitgeist.
• Annual Reviews in Sociology are review articles on various topics in Sociology written by scholars. These articles are great ways to get an overview of research on a topic as well as a reliable source of citations to important scholarship.

• Sociologists use the American Sociological Association Style Guide to format citations for papers. The Library offers an overview and samples of the ASA Citation style.

• Oxford Social Explorer contains millions of datapoints, collected from the US Census (1870-present), all American Community Surveys, Religious group information, Carbon Emissions data, and more for the United States. Data is presented as tables, downloadable files, and maps.

• UO's Data Services Lab - Part of the Social Sciences Instruction Lab, they provide access to datasets as well as helping researchers with their own data management and analysis.
• Statistical Information Guide - This guide to statistical information contains links and explanations of a number of good sources of data.
• ICPSR: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research.
• Census Data Use for researching characteristics of the U.S. population, down to very small areas (neighborhoods).
• FedStats Use to find statistics from the 99 other federal statistical agencies.
• Google's Advanced Search can be a great way to search for publicly available datasets if you know a few tricks:
  • "Filetype:" – allows you to select a type of file such as Adobe PDF (pdf) or Microsoft Excel (xls) documents; publicly available articles are often in the PDF format; publicly available datasets are often in Excel format.
  • "Site:" – allows you to search just within a particular website, or a section of a website. This is especially powerful when combined with a "filetype:" search
• For more Open Access resources, see Open Access Resources for Sociology & Anthropology