Joy Weese Moll
Q420
October 7, 2003
Subject Guide for Economics
Economics 101
For a quick basic overview of
economic statistics and theory, read these two well-written slim volumes:
- Clayton, Gary E. and Martin Gerhard Giesbrecht. A
Guide to Everyday Economic Statistics. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2001.
- Clayton, Gary E. and Martin Gerhard Giesbrecht. A
Guide to Everyday Economic Thinking. Boston: McGraw-Hill, c1997
To keep up with the changing
world of economics in a general way, scan the Wall Street Journal and/or
the financial section of The New York Times. The Department of Commerce
updates information daily with news and economic indicators on the on-line
version of the State of the Nation. This is accessible through the MU
database STAT-USA with a password and is another quick way to keep up to date.
How Economists Organize
Themselves
In the broadest realm,
economists are social scientists. This is reflected in the largest economics professional
organization – the annual meeting of the American Economic Association is in
January in conjunction with the 50-plus other organizations of the Allied
Social Science Associations. The Conference Proceedings for AEA are published
in the May issue of American Economic Review which is available,
full-text, in the ProQuest ABI-Inform database at Mizzou’s library website.
Economics has a growing
number of subfields like econometrics (economic statistics), agricultural economics,
economic history, economic development, and feminist economics. These
subfields, and many others, have their own professional organizations—most are
loosely associated with the AEA or the ASSA.
Although not always reflected
in their organizations, economists also classify themselves based on three
broad types of employer – whether college/university, business/industrial, or
government/non-governmental organization.
Here are four of the largest
professional organizations for economists with their web addresses:
American Economic
Association: www.vanderbilt.edu/AEA
American Institute for
Economic Research: www.aier.org
Econometric Society: www.econometricsociety.org
American Agricultural
Economics Association: www.aaea.org
Economic Journals
The Journal of Economic
Literature, published quarterly by the AEA, is the most important journal
for economics librarians because it publishes many book reviews per issue and
because it maintains the JEL classification, a controlled-vocabulary
subject list that is used in the economic field. Both JEL and its sister
publication, the quarterly Journal of Economic Perspectives, are quite
readable by non-professionals. They are available on TDNet through ProQuest
databases, but the full text version is delayed three years.
Two other important journals
are Econometrica published by the Econometric Society and the American
Journal of Agricultural Economics published by the American Journal of Agricultural
Economics. These are most suitable for academics in economics. They are both
available full text through TDNet, including the most recent issues.
There are many other
journals, magazines, and newsletters (on-line and off) published by other professional
organizations and many governmental and non-governmental groups.
Indexes and Abstracts
EconLit, produced by the American
Economics Association, is the major economics index and abstracting service. It
indexes articles from 400 economics journals, collected works in books, working
papers, and dissertations. There is full text of the JEL book reviews. It’s
available through MU’s databases. Unfortunately, the Ovid WebSPIRS interface on
top of EconLit makes it a bit difficult. EconLit is subject-searchable with the
AEA’s JEL classification. This is facilitated by bringing up the JEL
classification web site (with no password access) in a separate window. That
web site is:
http://www.aeaweb.org/journal/elclasjn.html
The aggregator ProQuest
ABI-Inform has many of the major economics magazines in full text. The
interface works much like EbscoHost and seems easy and intuitive.
PAIS through MU’s database
has a different Ovid interface than EconLit and is even more difficult to use.
But it is possible to do both keyword and subject searches in it.
The Social Sciences
Citation Index covers all of the major economics journals.
Statistics
Statistics are a vital aspect
of modern-day economics although this is an area of some dissent. There are
economists who argue that human beings are not completely rational and
therefore are not adequately modeled by statistical methods. Others argue that,
in the end, economic decisions effect real people and it’s important to not get
so caught up in the numbers that the humanity is lost.
In spite of those cautions,
econometrics is the fastest growing subfield of economics and reference
librarians who work with economists are often faced with queries about how to
get particular statistics.
Several of the larger
statistics databases mentioned by Balay and Jensen have, since those books were
printed, been merged into one big Lexis/Nexis database. It’s called Lexis/Nexis
Statistical and has a huge number of government statistics easily accessed
using powerful specialized tools like limiters and a subject list.
Unfortunately, the subject list is the creation of Lexis/Nexis rather than JEL’s
classification system. This database is available at MU with a password.
Two government sites provide
many statistics for free. An on-line version of The Statistical Abstract of the
United
States
is available at this site:
http://www.census.gov/statab/www/
Fedstats is available here:
http://www.fedstats.gov/
Gray literature
Since currency is vital in
economics, much of the most important work is published as gray literature. Besides
EconLit, which includes working papers in its indexing, there are two web sites
with abstracts and many full text versions of working papers:
http://ideas.repec.org/
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/DisplayAbstractSearch.cfm
The IDEAS site has a greater
number of papers, but the Social Science Research Network has a more
professional look. Both of these sites allow browsing by JEL
classifications.
Monographs
The New Palgrave: A
Dictionary of Economics is the
classic reference work in this field. Mr. Palgrave published his original Dictionary
of Political Economy in the 1890s. Many of the entries in this multi-volume
work are encyclopedic. Bibliographies and cross references make it even more
useful to librarians and students.
- Eatwell, John, Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman. The New Palgrave:
A Dictionary of Economics. London: The MacMillan Press, 1987.
Other sources are available
under the LCSH subject “Economics” and nearby topics beginning with “Econ.”
There are many related and narrower terms like “Exchange,” “Resource
allocation,” and “Supply and demand.”
The preeminent library
collection is at Harvard with material in both the main library and the
business library:
http://lib.harvard.edu/
Electronic Sources
Two web portals and a third
economics web site provide good starting points for many kinds of general and
specialized reference questions in economics.
The AEA’s web portal,
Resources for Economists, is a selective list of web sites organized by broad
topics like Data, Teaching Resources, or Neat Stuff (which has links to sites
with jokes about economists and on-line currency exhibits among others). That
site is:
http://www.aeaweb.org/RFE/index.html
WebEc is a very large site.
Since it is produced in Helsinki,
it has broad coverage of international economics. Browsing by subject is easy
and intuitive, although it does not use JEL classifications, so isn’t as
precise. There is also a keyword search. That site is:
http://www.helsinki.fi/WebEc/
The American Institute for
Economic Research has an attractive web site with newsletter-style reports on
current events and economics. This would be a good starting point for a student
looking for a paper topic. And a good site for a librarian to browse once in a
while to keep up to date on the issues.
www.aier.org
Bibliography
Balay, Robert, ed. Guide to Reference Books. Chicago: American Library Association, 1996.
Encyclopedia of Associations. Detroit:
Gale Research Co., 2003.
Jensen, Kristi. “Economics.” In The Social
Sciences: A Cross-Disciplinary Guide to Selected Resources, edited by Nancy
L. Heron. Greenwood
Village, Colorado: Libraries Unlimited, 2002.
LaGuardia, Cheryl ed. Magazines for Libraries. New Providence, NJ: R.R. Bowker, 2002. (Bill Katz and Linda Sternburg
Katz, consulting editors)
Library of Congress Subject Headings, Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 2001.