Economics

EconLit Search Tips

Use the Advanced Search:

Click on the Advanced Search link located beneath the Basic Search box.

Separate your keyword concepts into different boxes. 

Think of synonyms for your search terms and then add the word or between the synonyms. This will expand your search results.

For instance, typing in economic growth or economic development in one search box will bring back results for both:

• trade openness and economic growth

and

• trade openness and economic development

Refine Your Results:

After you search keywords, use the Refine Results column of the left sidebar to narrow your results.

Refine by:

• Publication Date: Slide the blue "Start Date" marker over to the right for more recently published articles.
• Source Types: Check off Academic Journals or you desired source type.

• Subject: Click Show More under Subjects to get an expanded box of the most commonly used subject headings in your results list. This is a way to focus in on the results that significantly cover your topic as opposed to mentioning your keywords in passing. 

• Language:  If there is a lot of foreign language materials in your results, limit to materials in the languages you can read. 

• View your current limiters at the top of the Refine columns.  Click on the "x" if you want to take a limit off the search. 

Using these refining tools, my results decreased from 1,038 items to 231 journal articles.

Search Multiple Databases at Once!

1) Navigate to any EBSCO database (i.e. EconLit, Political Science Complete, Legal Collection, Academic Search Complete, etc.)

2) Before you search, click on "Choose Databases" above the search box. 

You will see a pop-up box containing all of the library's EBSCO databases.  

3) Browse through the database list and check off the databases you want to search simultaneously. 

Tip: Hover above the  icon to the right of the database name to learn about that database. 

Then Click OK. 

Now you can search multiple databases at once!

If your topic is interdisciplinary, you can search across subjects by adding other databases such as:

Business Source Complete

Communication Source

Education Source

Gender Studies Database

Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition

SocINDEX

and many more!

Refine on the Right! 

Find peer-reviewed journal articles in Primo by using the Tweak My Results column on the right.

- Under Resource Type, select Articles.

AND

- Then scroll down to Availability and click on Peer-Reviewed Journals.

IDEAS is the largest bibliographic database dedicated to Economics and available freely on the Internet. It from a volunteer effort unkown as RePEc (Research Papers in Economics), with considerable help from Christian Zimmermann at the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.