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Political Science

Research and Resource guide on the subject of Political Science

How to use this guide

Welcome to the Political Science subject guide. These resources are recommended as starting points for your research in political science, policy, and international relations.

Find Data & Statistics

For finding data (mostly polling data) and summary statistics. "Data" may not have accompanying analysis; "statistics" usually result from data analysis and include charts and reported summary statistics. See ICPSR's Data vs Summary statistics decision tree if you're not sure which of these you're looking for

Find Books
Useful for finding books and e-books, both available at the Leatherby Libraries as well as worldwide through Interlibrary Loan.

Find Articles
Useful for finding peer-reviewed articles, case studies, news articles, conference proceedings, dissertations, book reviews, and more.

Find Grey Literature

"Grey literature" is a term used by researchers and librarians to encompass everything published outside of journal articles and books. This can be very important to political science research, as many policy experts work in government, think tanks, IGOs, or NGOs rather than at universities and do not publish in traditional "scholarly" ways. This page has resources to help you find documents from these types of institutions.

Best Bets

The Libraries' Discover search (the same as the Start Your Search box on the homepage) searches the full collection, from books to DvDs to journal articles. A good place for a very broad search. You can use filters and more complex searches to narrow results to usable quantities.

Use Start Your Search to search across multiple databases with a single search.


These databases are good choices for many political science topics:


Google Scholar is a popular search location that uses the same technology as normal Google search to collect articles from around the internet, unlike databases that contain have specific journals. This means that Google Scholar is searching an enormous number of articles, but also that no human filtering has occurred like what happens when a journal is added to a database.

Topic Sources

Related guides

Depending on the nature of your research, you may also want to look at the Leatherby Libraries' guides for: