Political Science: A Guide to Research

Find information on elections, interest groups, lobbying, polls, and political speech.

Find resources for foreign relations, global security, political economy, and more.

Find resources for researching a specific country's government, politics, economy, and more.

Find articles, policy papers, think tanks and more for understanding national and international public policy.

Resources for classical and modern approaches to political theory.

Find out how to discover laws for a specific topic, how to trace legislation, how to find analysis of the law. Includes historical law resources.

Get help using APA, MLA, IEEE, and Chicago styles, and citing data.

Find current, historical, and SMU newspapers.

Look for the subject filters for "political science" to help narrow results. For books, you may need to eliminate government documents by removing "United States" as an author in the Advanced Search.

Handbooks are a great place to start for summaries on what is known within a specific topic. Also, find citations of major related work. This is a Library Search for all books in the series, including the topics of political theory, economy, communications, institutions, and international relations.

Look for the search box in the upper right corner to find articles that cover the state of the research, with citations to major literature. These are great for understanding the state of the literature, and can include critique of methodology and future directions for research.