Research Guides: Politics: Honors Thesis

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Sources of Data and Literature on your topic

Conducting a literature review
Finding high-quality datasets

Worldwide Political Science Abstracts This link opens in a new window
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 This link opens in a new window
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) This link opens in a new window
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 This link opens in a new window
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 This link opens in a new window
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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 This link opens in a new window
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) This link opens in a new window
ICPSR is a social science repository that includes curated data sets pertaining to many disciplines within the social sciences. ICPSR also links data to relevant scholarly research, making it a useful tool for identifying articles and studies that have used each dataset.
International Security & Counter-Terrorism Reference Center (ISCTRC) This link opens in a new window
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.

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
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
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.

Gallup Respondent-Level Data This link opens in a new window
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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 products and get extracts that are generated by Data Services. | Person-level data
Users must create an account with Gallup's WorldPoll Reference tool to discover data. See the documentation for complete information.
L2 Political Academic Voter File This link opens in a new window
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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. The data file is updated on a continuous basis.
Because this data contains personally identifying information (PID), users of the VoterMapping extraction tool must be current NYU faculty, researchers, or doctoral students and must agree to the Terms of Use, which include asserting that the requested data represents research that has been registered with NYU's University Committee of Research Involving Human Subjects. Questions should be directed to data.services@nyu.edu

Recommended Data Archives

Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) This link opens in a new window
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.
Roper Center Public Opinion Archives (iPoll) This link opens in a new window
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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.

Dataverse
An open source web application for sharing and locating datasets in the social and physical sciences.
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.

Data-Planet Statistical Datasets This link opens in a new window
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Data-Planet Statistical Datasets aggregates datasets sourced from reputable public and private organizations, such as OECD, 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. One of the more valuable resources in this archive is David Leip's Presidential Atlas election data for the United States.
Spatial Data Repository (SDR) This link opens in a new window
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.