Political Science Guide

With hundreds of full-text journals, reference books and thousands of conference papers, Political Science Complete is a valuable resource for political science students, researchers and government institutions. Subjects covered include: comparative politics, humanitarian issues, international relations, law and legislation, non-governmental organizations, and political theory.

NOTE: First-time users will be asked to create an ICPSR MyData account; thereafter, you will need your email address and password to download data.

Are you interested in determining the average age at which men versus women begin smoking? What if you need to know whether age at marriage differs between your region of the country and other regions, or about differences in political attitudes based on age, gender, education, race, or ethnicity? These and many other questions can be answered by studies in the ICPSR data holdings. Note that ICPSR does not provide publications, reports, or ready-made statistics. What ICPSR does supply are the numeric raw data used to create publications, reports, and figures.

ICPSR, established in 1962, provides access to a large archive of social science data for research and instruction and offers training in quantitative methods. To ensure that data are available to future generations of scholars, ICPSR preserves data, migrating them to new storage media as changes in technology warrant. ICPSR also provides user support to assist researchers in identifying relevant data for analysis to conduct secondary research and write articles, papers, and theses.

In addition to the general archive, ICPSR hosts a number of special topic archives, including the Health and Medical Care Archive (HMCA), Child Care and Early Education (Research Connections), Data Preservation Alliance for the Social Sciences (Data-PASS), Data Sharing for Demographic Research (DSDR), the Resource Center for Minority Data (RCMD), the National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging (NACDA), the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD), Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), the National Addiction & HIV Data Archive Program (NAHDAP), and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Data Archive (SAMHDA). Data from all of these topical archives are available on the ICPSR website.

Use Social Explorer to analyze and visualize the characteristics of almost any location. Whether you are interested in markets, voting, poverty, aging populations, ethnicity and race, spending patterns, health indicators, crime, environment, or education, Social Explorer’s easy to use tools will facilitate your analyses. You can see trends and make comparisons over time and place to gain insights and help make decisions.

Authoritative database for current issues, studies, thoughts, and trends in the legal world. It is an excellent resource for attorneys, educators, business people, law librarians, students, paralegals, and others involved with the law.

Subjects covered include:

Administrative law
Antitrust law
Banking
Business law
Constitutional law
Criminal law
Domestic relations
Estate planning
Family law
Food, drug and cosmetic law
Insurance law
Intellectual property law
Internet and information science law
Landlord/tenant law
Legal librarianship
Multinational corporations
Non-profit corporations
Patent and trademark
Probate
Securities
Sports and entertainment law
Tax law
Trade regulation

Divided into 24 ‘quality’ criteria and four ‘impact’ criteria, our editors select the most influential journals in their respective fields (using citation activity as the primary indicator of impact) for the Social Sciences Citation Index.