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Online Resources for Research Papers
There are a number of places you can use to search for academic material online. Your first start should be the UI Library, and the Infohawk Gateway. Infohawk provides a single point of entry for all online resources -- including the standard catalog and online services such as Jstor, which let you search for journal articles and other materials. Many of these resources require you to either be at a UI-based computer, or logged in with your HawkID.
There are branch libraries with their own online sources. In particular, students in my classes often find the Psychology Library useful and their online access to Psychinfo, a full text database of psychology journal articles.
The library also has an interesting service called "Live Reference" where you can chat online with a librarian.
The American Political Science Association (APSA) maintains an online repository of papers presented at its annual conference. While these papers are not yet published, they represent the most recent work in the field. You can search the archive WITHOUT being logged in, using the search box on the left side of the page. You can search by author, title, keywords, or full-text. Other associations, like the Midwest Political Science Association, and the Southern Political Science Association, also have similar repositories. Note that sometimes there will only be an author and paper title -- the paper won't be available. In such cases you can usually email the author to get a copy of the paper.
Another interesting online resource is at http://scholar.google.com. Google has begun this service which search academic journals, libraries, and .EDU domains for materials. If you enter an author into the search box, for example "Redlawsk", you will get a list of both published and unpublished material by that author. Note that if the author's name is very common, it will be hard to sort it out. But if it is unusual, like "Redlawsk", you will be able to quickly find his or her work. What is especially useful is that under each entry is a linked labeled"Cited by xx" (where xx is a number). Click on this link and you will find all of the work Google knows about that actually cites the particular article.
So for example, if you do enter "Redlawsk", you get the following as the first hit:
Advantages and Disadvantages of Cognitive Heuristics in Political Decision Making - UIowa InfoLink:Full Text - all 2 versions »
RR Lau, DP Redlawsk - American Journal of Political Science, 2001 - JSTOR
Richard R. Lau. David P. Redlawsk. American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 45,
No. 4, 951-971. ... David P. Redlawsk is Assistant Professor of Political Science,
University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52246 (david-redlawsk@ uiowa.edu). ...
Cited by 116 - Related Articles - Web Search
If you click on the "Cited by 116" link, you get a list of other papers/publication that cite this one, meaning that the authors of those works used this one as one of their sources. Pretty nifty!
Help Writing Research Papers
There are a lot of resources on the web to help you figure out how to do a research paper. But, of course, the option of using a "paper" site is not a good one. Believe it or not your professors usually know when you've turned in work that is not your own. The risk of a failure in the course, or worse, for plagiarism just isn't worth it.
Here are some places to check out:
The University of Iowa Writing Center -- your first stop! These folks might have everything you need.
At the University of Chicago there is a "Writing in College" program. This site gives you a great outline of how to do college level writing.
Or you might want to check out the University of North Carolina's writing center. They're pretty good as well. You might really want to look closely at their specific guidelines for writing in political science.
And here are a few more UI based sites that might be useful to you.
The Academic Advising Center's site on improving paper writing.
A UI course on Greek Literature has some great links for paper writing.
The History department has a writing center.