Information-Finding and the Research Process: A Guide to Sources and Methods for Public Administration and the Policy Sciences

This guide to information-finding sources and techniques is attuned to the needs of researchers in all the social and behavioral sciences with a particular focus on public administration and related fields. This guide is unique in its analyses of how to design the research process in an evolving manner using approaches that reflect combinations of models, methods, and data sources. This guide is also comprehensive in its coverage of a broad spectrum of the important primary and secondary source materials in all their current forms. Students and researchers in the policy sciences, especially at the graduate level, will find this research and reference guide an essential one. Simpson's broadly conceived guide covers sources and methods of approach to doing social science research. The book opens with an analysis of information-finding and public administration as a special and disparate series of fields for study. Subsequent chapters discuss research strategies and designs and offer annotative bibliographies evaluating the usefulness of primary and secondary sources, examining guides to the literature, the conventional library catalog, journal literature, indexing and abstracting services, computer searches, separately published bibliographies, public statistics, machine-readable data files, government documents, sources of methodology and research instruments, other sources of information, archives and other primary sources, and annual reviews. This topical and logically developed set of chapters makes the guide easy to use, and a general subject index makes this reference most accessible.

Table of Contents:
Information-Finding and Public Administration as a Field of Study The Research Problem ANMD Search Strategy Overviews of Theory and Current Developments Overviews of Theory in Applied Contexts; Annual Reviews; Guides to the Literature The Conventional Library Catalog and Sources of Current Books The Computerized Library Book Catalog The Journal Literature Indexing and Abstracting Services Searching the Literature by Computer Separately Published Bibliographies Published Statistics Machine-Readable Data Files Government Documents Sources of Methodology & Research Instruments Other Sources of Information Archives & Other Primary Sources Appendices Index

About the Author :
ANTONY E. SIMPSON, Executive Officer, PhD Program in Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, has long specialized in archival research and in guiding doctoral candidates in original research projects. His previous publications include, among others, The Literature of Police Corruption: A Guide to Bibliography and Theory (1977) and Guide to Library Research in Public Administration (1977). Simpson also holds an appointment as Adjunct Professor at the Queens College Graduate School of Library and Information Studies.

Review :
"This book has the potential to become a classic textbook in the field of public administration. It seeks to integrate an overview of conceptual foundations of the field with informed guidance for the design and implementation of research studies. . . . It is timely for a book to move beyond the technical questions about how to systematically organize and analyze information, to deal with the larger processes of determining what topics to research, and the more significant process of framing research questions and research findings in the context of an evolving body of theoretical and research literature."-F. Warren Benton Chair, Department of Public Management John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY