Research Guides: Data Sources: Resources for Politics Honors Seminars

Conducting a literature review

Use these databases to help conduct your literature review:

Worldwide Political Science Abstracts
Worldwide Political Science Abstracts provides citations, abstracts, and indexing of the international serials literature in political science and its complementary fields, including international relations, law, and public administration.
Web of Science Core Collection
Web of Science Core Collection is a multidisciplinary citation index that includes scholarly articles, conference proceedings, and books in the biomedical, psychosocial, and arts and humanities. The collections contain Science Citation, Social Sciences Citation Index, Arts and Humanities Citation Index , Conference Proceedings Citation Index, Book Citation Index, Emerging Sources Citation Index and Current Chemical Reactions index.
Columbia International Affairs Online (CIAO)
Columbia International Affairs Online (CIAO) is a source for theory and research in international affairs. It includes scholarship, working papers from university research institutes, occasional papers series from NGOs, foundation-funded research projects, proceedings from conferences, books, journals, case studies for teaching, and policy briefs.
EconLit
EconLit is published by the American Economic Association and indexes and abstracts a wide range of economics-related literature. An expanded version of the Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) indexes of journals, books, and dissertations, EconLit covers both economic theory and application. Coverage dates: 1969 to present.
Oxford Bibliographies
Oxford Bibliographies presents constantly updated articles that contain citations (with annotations) and commentaries for sources across the disciplines. Users can search topics and gather relevant journal article and book citations, online resources, data sources, and more.
PAIS International
PAIS International contains journal articles, books, government documents, statistical directories, grey literature, research reports, conference reports, publications of international agencies for public affairs, public and social policies, and international relations.
Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)

ICPSR is a social science repository that includes curated data sets pertaining to many disciplines within the social sciences. ICPSR contains original codebooks and descriptions of methodology, offers multiple file format downloads, and links data to relevant scholarly research. Users can search at the variable level and trace datasets to their use in academic publications. The archive also includes data-driven learning guides for those teaching with data.

Users need to login to access. Use the single sign-in with Google and when prompted, use NetID credentials.
International Security & Counter-Terrorism Reference Center (ISCTRC)
International Security & Counter-Terrorism Reference Center provides information on security and terrorism policy and analysis, including reports such as Stratfor Analysis, Stratfor Forecasts and Stratfor Geopolitical Diary.

Finding high-quality datasets

Targeted Datasets

There are many longstanding studies, centers, and data sources available that you can use to develop your thesis project. What we have listed here are very large, robust, multifaceted data study projects and products that are particularly useful.

American National Election Studies (ANES)
The American National Election Studies (ANES) produces data on voting, public opinion, and political participation to serve the research needs of social scientists, teachers, students, policy makers and journalists who want to better understand the theoretical and empirical foundations of national election outcomes. The center releases pre- and post-election waves and has aggregated a contiguous file across the entire timespan of the survey (the Time Series Cumulative file). Person-level.
Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS)
The three major data infrastructure projects of the Minnesota Population center include: IPUMS-International; an integrated series of census microdata samples from 1960 to the present; IPUMS-USA, an integrated series of representative samples drawn from the U.S. censuses of the period from 1850 to 2000; and IPUMS-USA, which also includes American Community Survey (ACS) data from 2000 to 2005. IPUMS-CPS provides integrated data and documentation from the March Current Population Survey (CPS) from 1962 to 2006. Other datasets include the North Atlantic Population Project, the National Historical Geographic Information System, and the Integrated Health Interview Series. Person-level.
L2 Political Academic Voter File Guide
The L2 Political Academic Voter File is a person-level dataset that represents the entire population of the United States that is registered to vote. L2 Political aggregates data from each of the states' public voter roles and supplements each record with modeled demographic variables, such as party affiliation, income, and many others. NYU licenses access to a map-based data extraction tool (VoterMapping) and also provides access to the underlying data files via NYU Research Workspace.

Gallup Respondent-Level Data
Gallup World Poll and U.S. Daily Tracking data at the respondent level provides a much-enhanced ability to trace connections between concepts and countries. Users can request extracts of the data behind Gallup's data surveys and get extracts that are generated by Data Services.

Users must create an account with Gallup's WorldPoll Reference tool to discover data. See the documentation for complete information.

Data.Census.Gov
This tool is the primary way to extract data from the Census and from the various American Community Survey data products. Microdata and other related census products may be better discovered elsewhere on the U.S. Census website.
General Social Survey (GSS)
The GSS contains a standard 'core' of demographic, behavioral, and attitudinal questions, plus topics of special interest. Many of the core questions have remained unchanged since 1972 to facilitate time-trend studies as well as replication of earlier findings. Registration required. Person-level.

Recommended Data Archives

Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)

ICPSR is a social science repository that includes curated data sets pertaining to many disciplines within the social sciences. ICPSR contains original codebooks and descriptions of methodology, offers multiple file format downloads, and links data to relevant scholarly research. Users can search at the variable level and trace datasets to their use in academic publications. The archive also includes data-driven learning guides for those teaching with data.

Users need to login to access. Use the single sign-in with Google and when prompted, use NetID credentials.
Roper Center Public Opinion Archives (iPoll)
The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research archives include datasets from thousands of public opinion surveys with national adult, state, foreign, and special subpopulation samples. The data catalog also includes the iPoll search tool, which allows users to discover data by searching keywords that appear in survey questions. Along with information on survey organization, interview dates, and type of sample, most results include abstracts indicating the subjects covered by the questions in the survey.

Important: Users must create a distinct account within the Roper system after authenticating with NYU to search and download data.
Sage Data
Sage Data aggregates datasets sourced from reputable public and private organizations, such as OECD, China Data Online, the United Nations, and the U.S. Census. It covers topics across many subject areas, including education, population and income, industry, commerce, trade, housing and construction. Users can create custom extracts and download files in delimited, SAS, or shapefile formats.
Spatial Data Repository (SDR)
The Spatial Data Repository (SDR) is NYU's portal for previewing and discovering geospatial data. The collection includes resources from open data and proprietary resources, and users can download layers and work with them in many GIS platforms.

NYU UltraViolet (UV)
UltraViolet provides long-term open access to a broad range of digital materials, including data, software, lesson plans, journal articles, book chapters, and the many more types of output the NYU community creates and/or uses in the course of their work at the University. NYU community members can deposit materials here for free, to be curated and preserved in the long-term.
Odum Institute for Research In Social Science
The Odum Institute maintains one of the oldest and largest catalog of machine-readable data in the U.S. It has an extensive collection of U.S. Census data, including one of the most complete holdings for 1970 Census files. Other major sources of data include the North Carolina State Data Center, which distributes North Carolina census data; and the National Center for Health Statistics.