Research Tools

(This list has been compiled by David Cook-Martin with generous help from colleagues and friends)

Finding Sources

UW-Madison Writing Center on Annotated Bibliographies
RefWorks and Zotero are both easy-to-use online bibliography management tools
Mendeley is a desktop application that makes it easy to manage scores of .pdf journal articles. And it's free! If you are a Mac user and want an upscale program to search for and manage pdfs as well as create bibs (not free).

World Bank: This site includes the widely used World Development Indicators and other international economic and demographic data.
International Relations Data Site: This is an exhaustive clearing house of economic, political, and legal data compiled by Paul Hensel of the Department of Political Science at Florida State University.

American Community Studies: America is changing, and so is the census. The American Community Survey lets communities see how they are changing - filling in the gaps between each 10-year census.
Current Population Surveys: Includes data on the annual rate of moving, and the characteristics of movers and nonmovers by type of move.
Integrated Public Use Microdata (IPUMS): IPUMS consists of 39 high-precision samples of the American population drawn from 15 federal censuses and from the American Community Surveys of 2000–06.

State Data Center of Iowa: “Includes migration between counties, between states, and internationally. Be sure you realize what type of migration the data refers to. I believe all the data is from the Census, but just the numbers relevant to Iowa have been extracted.” — Katie Dunn

Gapminder: A nonprofit venture promoting sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by increased use and understanding of statistics and other information about social, economic, and environmental development at local, national, and global levels.
US Atlas of Cancer Mortality: Geographic patterns and time trends of cancer deaths in the U.S.
The National Atlas: Make your own maps with overlays of factors like agriculture, economics, health, climate, water, environment, etc.
Snapshot of Global Migration
USGS Seamless: The National Map Seamless Server is the ultimate location to explore and retrieve data. U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the EROS Data Center (EDC) are committed to providing access to geospatial data through The National Map. An approach is to provide free downloads of national base layers, as well as other geospatial data layers. These layers are divided into framework categories.
GeoDa Software: This software is designed to implement techniques for exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) on lattice data (points and polygons). The free program provides a user-friendly and graphical interface to methods of descriptive spatial data analysis, such as spatial autocorrelation statistics, as well as basic spatial regression functionality.

Edward Tuft’s Website: Tufte is an expert on data visualization and its real-life consequences. From his site: “[Tufte] has written seven books, including Visual Explanations, Envisioning Information, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and Data Analysis for Politics and Policy. He writes, designs, and self-publishes his books on analytical design, which have received more than 40 awards for content and design. He is Professor Emeritus at Yale University, where he taught courses in statistical evidence, information design, and interface design. His current work includes landscape sculpture, printmaking, video and a new book.”
Visualizing Economics: Making the Invisible Hand Visible: Income distribution in the U.S. An interesting graph to examine on this site is of U.S. Income Distribution by Household in 2005.
Radical Cartography: This sites maps inequality in U.S. cities. It’s worth reading the About entry.

eHRAF World Cultures (Human Relations Area Files): a cross-cultural database that contains information on all aspects of cultural and social life. The annually-growing eHRAF database is unique in that the information is organized into cultures and ethnic groups and the full-text sources are subject-indexed at the paragraph level.
ArtStor: This is a growing collection of images from a number of sources, including Grinnell College.
Pioneer Digital Image Database: Grinnell's own collection of digital images.
Boston University: From Boston University Libraries, this is has a good selection under “metasites.”
Getty Images
Oral History Repositories