Today I want to mention some sources for economic (and social) statistics. The only advice I’d give for using economic statistics is to try to find a statistic from multiple sources because they can be reported so differently depending on source. Historical Statistics of the United States I really like this source. Covers recent few decades as well as past centuries. Statistics are easy to find and easy to use. International Financial Statistics Online Statistics from the International Monetary Fund Source OECD Development sources from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development World Development Indicators Online Statistics from the World Bank —Fred Rowland

Sage is one of the academic and professional market’s major social science publishers. Sage eReference is a collection of 45 online encyclopedias. Here’s a complete list of titles. Accessible from the All Databases list. Other Reference Databases Don’t forget about our other reference databases. You’ve never had it so good. Gale Virtual Reference Library; Oxford Reference Online; xreferplus. Accessible from the All Databases list. Philosophy Compass and Religion Compass These are very new review journals in philosophy, religion, and other areas. Access via Journal Finder. Each article is a broad review of a particular topic with a discussion of the literature. They are supposed to be current and very relevant. Review journals have become very big in the sciences where new literature comes out at a crushing pace. These two for philosophy and religion are great tools for faculty that are approaching a new field, for graduate students who are studying for exams and dissertations, and for advanced undergraduates. Take a look and let me know what you think. —Fred Rowland

When you are doing your research, don’t forget about Temple’s business databases. Although they might sound like unlikely sources, there are some good reasons to keep them in mind: 1) they are absolutely HUGE databases; 2) they are international so you will find info from and about places all around the world; and 3) businesses have penetrated just about every aspect of our lives (not a good thing). Below I’ve listed the two most important general business databases. Most business schools of any stature have these two. I’ve also linked some articles so you can get a sense of the stuff you might find. Business Source Premier: over 2800 full-text scholarly journals. ABI Inform: indexes over 4000 titles, 3000 in full-text, including the Wall Street Journal. —Fred Rowland

See how to directly export records from Google Scholar into Refworks: http://librariancentral.blogspot.com/2007/02/out-of-cite.html. One more good reason to use Refworks. —Fred Rowland

You know how you can finish a term paper at about 8:00pm the night before it is due, only to spend three or four additional hours slogging through the citations and bibliography? By the time the 11:00 news is on you’re wailing and gnashing teeth. Refworks can help end that pain. Just download the citations from the library’s databases into Refworks and output them in MLA, APA, or Chicago style. Doing a dissertation any time soon? Refworks can save you loads of time by organizing your sources. The end will come sooner than you think. Need to send a recently finished article out to five different publishers with five different citation styles? If you’ve been using Refworks along with the Write-N-Cite plugin for Microsoft Word, this task can be performed in a jiffy. You’ll think it’s a miracle. Refworks, the online database that allows you to download, store, organize, and output references, is getting easier and easier to use because so many scholarly databases are enabling direct exports into it. Just two vendors EBSCO and CSA have enabled this for all of the databases we purchase from them, which comes to about 75 including Academic Search Premier, ATLA, ERIC, Medline, MLA International Bibliography, Philosopher’s Index, Index Islamicus, Criminal Justice Abstracts, and Sociological Abstracts. Refworks is free to all Temple students, faculty, and staff. Just click on the link above and sign up for a personal account. Below are five video clips that show how to export references from selected scholarly databases directly into Refworks. You will need Adobe Flash on your computer to watch them (my understanding is that most computers have this now). In each I start from a search results list, select a few records, and then export them into Refworks. Philosopher’s Index Academic Search Premier JSTOR Project Muse Blackwell Synergy And here’s one last video clip on outputting your bibliography using Refworks. Outputting Bibliography Check out Refworks today! You’ll be glad that you did. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me. —Fred Rowland