Econ211: Research Methods in Economics 2024: Books

What you are searching: Records representing every hard-copy book in our library and Roanoke College’s library, plus all of our e-books. These records contain:

•  Title/Author/Location/Call Number/Subject Headings/Table of Contents (sometimes)
• When searching health topics, you will likely find many government documents on these subjects. Most of these (particularly from 2000 onwards) will be located online.

Searching:

•  Keywords = terms important to your topic, NOT words such as of, then, where, what, etc.
• Upon finding a relevant book, look at the book’s subject headings. If there is a relevant subject heading, click on it, and follow the subject heading to other books on your topic.
• Sign In to see the Request icon to get books from Roanoke College or to request books be pulled for you from the HU collection.
• Browse the call number range where you find book(s) of interest: You can do do this virtually at the bottom of the book record screen.
• If you find a book without a call number, it is an online book. Follow the links to view the book online. 

You can use the same searches you used effectively in the catalog (both subject and keyword), and get a lot more results! WorldCat is the closest thing there is to a universal library catalog. It includes the holdings of thousands of libraries worldwide.

• Use the limiters: for example, “not juvenile” and “not fiction.”
• Subscription WorldCat defaults to put the most popular materials on top. Free WorldCat defaults to put the most relevant materials on top.
• Because you are searching a much larger universe of material, you may want to search for your terms only in the title.
• If a very small number of libraries (think single digits) hold the item, we may have trouble getting it through Interlibrary Loan.

Try searching the full text of books with Google Books. You’ll get results, almost guaranteed (whether they’re relevant is another story!).

Tips:

• Remember that you are searching full text. You will want to include more specific search terms.
• Most pre-1923 books will be available full-text as PDFs. Post-1923 books (because of copyright restrictions) will only let you view a small number of pages or a snippet of text.
• If you’ve found a title of interest, search for the title in our catalog, or use the Google link, “Find this book in a library.” (which takes you to OpenWorldCat).
• Use the “References from Web Pages” and “References from scholarly works” linked at the bottom of the “about this book” page.