Research Guides: Political Science: A Guide to Research

American Politics and Public Policy
Find information on elections, interest groups, lobbying, policy papers, think tanks, and polls.
Citation Help
Get help using APA, MLA, IEEE, and Chicago styles, and citing data.
Countries Research
Find background, business, culture, political, and demographic information for different countries.
Government Information
Guide to the US branches of the government, international governments, and the Fondren Library print collection.
Library Search Help
Information on the best way to utilize Library Search to find books, articles, and journals.
Newspapers
Find current, historical, and SMU newspapers.
Political Theory
Resources for classical and modern approaches to political theory.
Statistical Sources
Find statistics by subject or location. Learn how to evaluate statistics.
U.S. Laws and Legislation
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.

PAIS
This is the best place to start for articles, books, government information, and research reports on topics related to government, politics, and public policy. Coverage is international. Be sure to click the blue "Other SMU Options" button to get the full text.
Columbia International Affairs Online
CIAO includes theory and research in international affairs. It publishes scholarship from 1991 onward that includes working papers from university research institutes, occasional papers series from NGOs, foundation-funded research projects, proceedings from conferences, books, journals and policy briefs.
Hein Online
This is your best bet for law review articles (look for Law Journal Library under Browse Databases by Name). You can also find primary source documents and collections of information around specific themes in the law.
Congressional Publications
Find primary source documents, including committee hearings, Congressional Record, records for members of Congress, and the U.S. Code. Use Congressional profiles and Legislative Histories for background information.
JSTOR
Back issues of scholarly journals and scholarly books across many disciplines. This can be used for finding older materials because there is a 3-5 year lag in currency.

Contact:

mheuer@smu.edu
(214) 768-1856

Oxford Bibliographies: Political Science
Offers exclusive, authoritative research guides that combine the best features of an annotated bibliography and a high-level encyclopedia.
Oxford Bibliographies: International Relations
Index of literature concerning the study of foreign affairs and political interaction between states, as well as the whole complex of cultural, economic, legal, military, and political relations of all states and their component populations, as well as non-state actors and international organizations.

Oxford Handbooks of Political Science
This is a Library Search for all books in the series, including the topics of political theory, economy, communications, institutions, and international relations. Handbooks are a great place to start for understanding the state of the research on a specific topic with links to citations of major related work.