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History 388-001: Hunger and Poverty in Market Economies - Course Guide
Contents
- Finding Books
- Article Indexes and Abstracts
- General International Data Sources
- More International Data on Hunger, Poverty and Development
This guide will help you find relevant information resources both in the Penn Library and on the Internet about hunger, development, and agricultural economics. Print materials relevant to these topics will be found mostly in Van Pelt Library, Penn's social sciences, humanities, and area studies library. Other Penn libraries with relevant materials are Lippincott Library (business, including labor), Fisher Fine Arts Library (city and regional planning, landscape architecture), and Biomedical Library (health, nutrition, medicine).
Franklin, Penn's online catalog, is one place to look for background material and statistical sources. Although keyword searching is the easiest way to get started, you may also want to use subject searching.
Keyword searching lets you combine ideas and/or create sets of terms:
Use ? at the end of a word to allow for different word endings
Example: econom? will find all records that include the words economic, economies, economy, etc.
Use quotation marks when you want two words together
Example: "sri lanka?" or "market econom?" will find all records including those phrases.
Use AND when you want both terms to appear in the record.
Example: hunger AND poverty
Use OR when you want either term
Example: poor? OR poverty?
If you want to find books about something, but you are not sure of subject headings, or if you want to find multiple subject headings, use the skey command. (subject keyword)
Example: skey bangladesh -- will retrieve items about bangladesh, rather than items published in Bangladesh.
Use parentheses to construct more complex searches.
Example: ("south asia?" or bangladesh?) AND (hunger? or povert? or poor?) AND (econom?)
Whether in printed form or electronic, the indexes listed below are useful for identifying current and past journal articles on a topic. Online indexes can be easy to search, but they are often restricted to articles published within the last decade.
General Social Sciences
- International Bibliography of the Social Sciences. (online)
- Online version of the UNESCO-sponsored International Bibliography of the Social Sciences, and presently compiled by the British Library, this index has international coverage.
- ISI Citation Indexes. (online)
- The ISI Citation Indexes include the Science, Social Science and Arts & Humanities Citation Indexes. The database covers 1978 to the present and is updated weekly. Both keyword and citation searching are available. The database covers science, social science, and arts & humanities journals.
- Ebsco Megafile. (online)
- General, multidisciplinary fulltext periodical database, covering all scholarly disciplines, with many general and popular magazines, and news sources. Includes bibliographic citations with indexing and abstracts for more than 16,000 periodicals.
Agriculture/Food
- CAB Abstracts. (online)
- International coverage of agriculture, forestry and related bio-science fields, including: human health, human nutrition, animal health, and resource management and conservation.
- AGRICOLA/Bibliography of Agriculture. (online)
- From the National Agriculture Library. The topics covered in this database include: agriculture, agronomy, animal science, biology, biotechnology, botany, breeding, conservation, crop management, dairy science, ecology, farm management, feed science, fertilizers, food and nutrition, forestry, horticulture, hydrology, hydroponics, microbiology, nutrition, pesticides, physiology, plant science, pollution, soil science, water quality, and zoology. Resources in all languages are represented. AGRICOLA indexes more than 2,000 serial titles as well as books, pamphlets, conference proceedings, research reports, government documents, monographs, theses, patents, software, audiovisual content, and microforms. In print from 1942 to the present; online from 1989.
Economics/Development
- EconLit. (online)
- American Economic Association, 1969-present. Monthly updates.
- The principal tool for identifying the professional and academic journal and book English-language literature in economics. EconLit corresponds to the print-format Journal of Economic Literature [1969-present, Lippincott Reference: HB1 .J6] and Index of Economic Articles [1886-present, Lippincott Reference: Z7164 .E2 I45].
- Searching EconLit can be made much easier by using the EconLit subject classification. Subject headings and subject codes may be browsed at the EconLit web site.
History
- Historical Abstracts. (online)
- Covers world history from 1450 to the present.
Public Policy/Political Science
- PAIS International. (online)
- Public Affairs Information Service. Public policy, government, international relations, politics, social sciences. Search terms include agricultural assistance, basic needs, food consumption, food relief, food supply, and malnutrition. For earlier coverage see the print format [Van Pelt Library Reference Stacks: JA 1 .P357], 1915-1994.
Population and Demography
- POPLINE. (online)
- Indexes books, chapters, technical reports, journal articles, papers, and unpublished reports. Topics include family planning programs and technology, fertility, population law and policy, demography, maternal and child health, AIDS and other STDs, reproducive health programs, women in development, primary health care communication, and population and the environment.
- Population Index. (online)
- Princeton, N.J.: Office of Population Research, Princeton University, Online covers 1986-present.
- Print: [Van Pelt Library Stacks: HB 848 .P665], 1935- present, latest five years in Reference.
- Provides bibliographic citations with annotations on literature concerning population studies, demography, and population-related problems. Arranged by broad topic, with author and geographic indexes. Each issue includes a literature review of a population-related topic.
Sociology
- Sociological Abstracts. (online)
- Covers 1968 to the present. Indexes journals, conference papers, books, and book chapters in sociology and related-fields, includes indexing for many journal titles on development and area studies.
Regional
- Bibliography of Asian Studies. (online)
- All subjects pertaining to East, Southeast, South Asia, and Indian Ocean countries. Citations to western-language periodical articles, monographs, chapters in edited volumes, conference proceedings, and anthologies. Contains the full data of all printed editions of the BAS issued from 1971 up to the 1991 edition (published 1997), as well as thousands of entries compiled since then. Since 1992, newly published individual monographs are no longer being added to the database.
Directories of IGOs and Government Sites
- National Statistics - links from UN to the main statistical sites of various countries.
- Links to IGOs and Foreign Government - Northwestern University Library
United Nations
- AccessUN. (online) - Penn subscribed database.
- Documents from the six main bodies of the United Nations - General Assembly, Security Council, Economic and Social Council, Trusteeship Council, Secretariat and International Court of Justice - are indexed. Full-text resolutions from the General Assembly, Security Council and the Economic and Social Council are appended to their respective bibliographic citations. In addition, several other document series will include the full-text version of the document. For documents not in full-text, try searching the symbol number in UN ODS below.
- UN ODS. (online) - Penn subscribed database, need password entered at Van Pelt.
- Currently known as UN Official Documents Search. Includes UN Development Programme, and UNICEF documents produced in New York beginning in 1993, parliamentary documents of the United Nations, including the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Economic Commission for Europe (ECE), the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), and other organizations, produced in Geneva beginning in 1993, and more.
Time series statistical information for countries collected from UN and related international governmental organizations. Country statistics on many subjects over time. Link:http://hdl.library.upenn.edu/1017/7058
- * Statistical Databases - see nutrition and agriculture, (TS - beginning date various, some as early as the 1960s, database)
- Global Information and Early Warning System on Food and Agriculture (GIEWS)
- FAO Catalogue on-line - search by country and date, links to many full-text publications.
PennTags Feed
ReliefWeb is the global hub for time-critical humanitarian information on Complex Emergencies and Natural Disasters. Includes links to reports for all countries, as well as info on which humanitarian aid organizations are working in a given country. Detailed and up-to-date information on the humanitarian issues in countries around the world.
The IMF publishes a range of time series data on IMF lending, exchange rates and other economic and financial indicators. Manuals, guides, and other material on statistical practices at the IMF, in member countries, and of the statistical community at large are also available.
This site presents the official data, definitions, methodologies and sources for the 48 indicators to measure progress towards the Millennium Development Goals.
The World Bank's principal data source on the global economy. More than 550 time series, 1960-present, on more than 200 countries and 18 country groups, covering demographic, social, economic, financial, natural resources, and environmental indicators. When selecting indicators, note that a change to Tree View will help with data selection.
The African Development Bank is the premier financial development institution of Africa, dedicated to combating poverty and improving the lives of people of the continent and engaged in the task of mobilizing resources towards the economic and social progress of its Regional Member Countries.
The Human Development Report is an independent report. It is commissioned by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and is the product of a selected team of leading scholars, development practitioners and members of the Human Development Report Office of UNDP. Various measures of development along a series of themes.
Publications, maps, and reports track UN food aid around the world. Very useful reports about food needs in various countries, and food issues and policies.
Topics often include databases for data on health topics by country.
Topics often include databases for data on health topics by country.
Choose a country and then select tabs for surveys, quikstats, and publications.
The Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) project is the third consecutive worldwide research project initiated by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to provide data and analysis on the population, health, and nutrition of women and children in developing countries. Its two predecessors, the World Fertility Survey (WFS) and the Contraceptive Prevalence Surveys (CPS), paved the way for the DHS project by focusing their research on questions related to fertility, family planning, and mortality. They also helped develop DHS' current reputation as a leader in the field of demographic and health research.
Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) are nationally-representative household surveys with large sample sizes (usually between 5,000 and 30,000 households). DHS surveys provide data for a wide range of monitoring and impact evaluation indicators in the areas of population, health, and nutrition.
The Data Online for Population, Health and Nutrition (DOLPHN) is an online statistical data resource of selected demographic and health indicators gathered from various sources for several countries of the world. The DOLPHN system is designed to provide users with quick and easy access to frequently used statistics.
"EarthTrends is a comprehensive online database, maintained by the World Resources Institute, that focuses on the environmental, social, and economic trends that shape our world."
There are country reports and detailed, time series data tables for most countries in each of the following areas:
Coastal and Marine Ecosystems, Water Resources and Freshwater Ecosystems, Climate and Atmosphere, Population, Health and Human Well-being, Economics, Business and the Environment, Energy and Resources, Biodiversity and Protected Areas, Agriculture and Food, Forests, Grasslands and Drylands, Environmental Governance and Institutions.
You may be asked to register to view content, but the registration process is easy and the content is free.
This domain contains a consolidated set of statistics related to food security. Main themes covered are food deprivation, food needs, food consumption, production and trade, diet composition, access to food, food aid and child nutritional status. It also includes statistical reports by country on the progress in reaching the hunger reduction targets established in the World Food Summit (FAO, Rome, 1996) and the Millennium Declaration (UN, New York, 2000).
PovertyNet provides an introduction to key issues as well as in-depth information on poverty measurement, monitoring, analysis, and on poverty reduction strategies for researchers and practitioners.
PovertyNet provides an introduction to key issues as well as in-depth information on poverty measurement, monitoring, analysis, and on poverty reduction strategies for researchers and practitioners.
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