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Texas A&M University Libraries

Research Guides

Writing & Publishing in the Social Sciences

Key Resources for Writing in the Social Sciences

FUNDING / GRANTS

  • Pivot - Includes COS Funding opportunities and  potential expertise or co-investigators/co-authors at TAMU or in other institutions. Sample searches: Funding: student leaders  / Profile: peer relations / Paper Invited: student services

AUTHORSHIP AND PUBLISHING

  • Authorship and publishing -- The services provided by the Office of Scholarly Communication:
    Copyright & fair use - knowing the your protections, limits, boundaries is important (types of rights/ duration/ limitations & exceptions/ using copyrighted works / teaching with copyrighted works / your copyright).
    Making your scholarly identity and impact visible (Create your ORCID / your Scholars@tamu profile), Scholar@tamu.edu - A profile system that hosts searchable expertise for faculty and TAMU organizations by gathering data from institution-level/enterprise systems, publicly available research data (e.g., grants and publications), and other authoritative sources. The data is compiled into a profile that you can edit to best represent your scholarship and expertise. 
    OAKTrust (TAMU repository digital service that collects and distributes the scholarly output of the University).
     
  • Creating you Google Scholar Citation Profile - The profile allows you to track citations to your publications, h-index, co-authors and other information. Log on to scholar.google.com, click the “My Citations” link at the top, set up your account, add publications and then make your profile public.
  • ResearchGate - social networking site for scientists and researchers to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators.

FINDING TOPICS/ SUBJECT TERMS/ BACKGROUND INFO/ MAIN AUTHORS / PUBLICATION TRENDS

  • A good starting point is a subject database. See a list of subject database in the next category. To look for ideas or topics, go to a subject database, for example, ERIC (EBSCO), enter a keyword in the search box, change the default search field to TI Title and then search. The retrieved studies will bear the keyword entered in the articles' titles, which will let you to glance over what has been out there quickly. Most databases will provide a tool called THESAURUS which let you to look for the good subject terms and the related terms.  E.g. student affair not found but it suggests to use student personnel service instead. To find the main scholars on a topic, do a keyword search in Scopus , and then look under AUTHOR NAME. You can also click on an author name link after an entry to display AUTHOR DETAILS. To see the publication trend on a topic, do a keyword search in Scopus, for example, "student service" OR "student affairs" AND leadership, search it and then click on ANALYZE SEARCH RESULTS,  you will be documents by YEAR, AUTHOR, AFFILIATION, TYPE, and SUBJECT AREA. For popular social topics, CQ RESEARCHER is a good database to find an overview on a topic including its background information, chronology or timeline of major events, legislature or other information

LITERATURE REVIE / SYSTEMATIC REVIEW

SELECTED DATABASES

SELECTED JOURNALS - (Scopus >college student affair> limit to> social science, journal, English, sort on:Relevance)

SEARCHING STRATEGIES

  • Break a topic into 2 or 3 concepts > Find synonyms for each and then use OR to string them together to expand the concept > Use AND to combine all the concepts.  Suppose you did your first search in ERIC like this:
    Student services AND women AND leaders   
    Now try to a different search by expanding the concepts with the OR connector.  You will see more hits!

    student affair OR student personnel OR student services OR graduate student AND women OR female OR woman OR females AND leader OR leadership OR manager OR supervisor
    [Note: One could also truncate a word like lead* which will retrieve variants like lead, leading, leader, leadership to get even more hits. Do the same for manag* and supervis*]

SELECTED  eBOOKS ON ACADEMIC WRITING

JOURNAL ACCEPTANCE RATES, TIME TO REVIEW, RANKING & IMPACT FACTORS

  • Cabell's Directory of Publishing Opportunities  - E.g.. College Student Affairs Journal - Acceptance Rate: 18%, Time to Review:2-3 mon, Comments: Yes, Plagiarism screen: No
  • Scopus - To investigate which journals have published similar topics, Scopus is a good place to find it out. for example:
    TITLE-ABS-KEY ( student  AND affairs  AND  leadership ) find 154 articles. Journal Of College Student Development
    (10)  Journal Of Student Affairs Research And Practice (7), American Journal Of Pharmaceutical Education (4) and so on.. If you click on the journal of College Student Development  you will find Its CiteScore 2017 is 1.15, SJR 806, and SNIP 1.017.
  • You could also use Web of Science to find similar data on a journal.

MANAGING CITATIONS

  • RefWorks / EndNotes- Popular tools to manage research citations. You can go to this page to set up your RefWorks account. 
  • Write N Cite - An app to be integrated into MS Word to automate the process of creating Reference List in your manuscripts. This app can be downloaded from your RefWorks account.

UNIVERSITY WRITING CENTER

Subjects: English