SOAN Librarian
LibKey Nomad
Catalyst
Database Best Bets
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Sociological Abstracts This link opens in a new window(Searches through citations, subject indexing, and some full text)
Main index to research in sociology, anthropology, and related fields in the social and behavioral sciences. Covers 1963 - current. -
JSTOR This link opens in a new windowA digital archive of important scholarly journal literature from many fields. Most journals are included from their first issue until 5 years ago. Be sure to limit by discipline to keep results manageable. To do so, scroll below search boxes and select "Sociology".
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Social Sciences Citation Index This link opens in a new windowSearch through current and historical literature in the social sciences, and perform cited reference searching to see who has cite a particular document. Covers 1898 - current.
Note: To do cited reference searching, click on "cited reference search," fill in an author's last name and publication date, figure out which of the resulting list of citations match the work you're looking for, and then "finish search" to see who has cited that work. -
Policy File Index This link opens in a new window(Searches through citations, subject indexing, and abstracts)
Find reports on public policy topics from major think tanks, research organizations, and advocacy groups including the Hoover Institution, International Monetary Fund, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, RAND Corporation, and the World Bank. Covers 1990-current.
Other Resources
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AARP Research TopicsAARP Research does a variety of work to support AARP’s mission of helping people turn their goals and dreams into real possibilities, strengthening communities and fighting for the issues that matter most to all families. Key issues we study include Social Security, Medicare, long-term care and caregiving, work and job security, healthy living, technology, and relationships.
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Pew Research - Older Adults and AgingSurvey research and reports from Pew.
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Brookings - Health & AgingThe Brookings Institution is a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C. Our mission is to conduct in-depth, nonpartisan research to improve policy and governance at local, national, and global levels.
Finding Government Reports (State and Federal)
The term 'aging' is a good one to use when searching for statistics on this topic in combination with other more specific terms.
Look for the government agencies that publish data by age.
Many tables will be broken down "by age" but don't have aging in the title - tables don't have to be "about" aging to have relevant information.
Reports tend to have lots of statistics and findings from data analysis. Since they're usually published in PDF format, you can use a Google filter to find them.
aging prisoners site:.gov filetype:pdf
Or, to find reports at the state level:
aging prisoners site:.us filetype:pdf
Boolean Search Tips (AND, OR, & NOT)
To expand or refine your search, try Boolean operators. Often the most useful Boolean operators are AND and OR.
- AND can limit results by requiring that multiple terms are included in the results
- OR can expand results by allowing for any of a set to be included. This can be particularly useful when you want to search using multiple terms or synonyms for something.
- NOT tells the database to exclude a term from your search results.
You can augment these Boolean operators with quotation marks, parentheses, and asterisk, in order to build out your search more fully.
- Quotation marks search for an exact phrase within the marks. Parentheses create a sub-search within your search string. An asterisk allows for variations of a word.
- Here is an example combining all of these techniques: (unhoused OR homeless) AND (aging OR elder*) AND "United States"
- Any items that have either the words "unhoused" or "homeless", limited to items that have the either the word "aging" as well as a variation of words that start with "elder," and also include the complete phrase "United States."
