European Parliament elections 2014 – suggested resources for your research

Voting will take place in the UK on Thursday 24th May for the European Parliament elections 2014. If you are thinking of voting or interested in doing research in this area then you may find some of these resources useful.

Library Resources

These are mostly resources that have been subscribed to by the Library and are only available to staff and students at University of Edinburgh. You can use these to find newspaper articles and commentaries, academic literature, background reading and documentaries and news programmes.

ASSIA (Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts)
Provides abstracts from around 650 UK, US and international journals. Coverage includes all branches of the applied social sciences, with over 375,000 records.

Box of Broadcasts
As mentioned in a previous blog post, this service is a bit like BBC iPlayer but offers much, much more. The service allows you to record and catch-up on missed programmes, schedule recordings, edit programmes into clips, search for recordings already made by other users, etc. Includes 60+ TV and radio channels.

European Sources Online
European Sources Online (ESO) is an online database and information service which provides access to information on the institutions and activities of the European Union, the countries, regions and other international organisations of Europe, and on issues of importance to European researchers, citizens and stakeholders.

Factiva (off-campus access available via VPN)
Provides full-text access to a large number of UK newspapers as well as full-text access to a significant range of international newspapers and news sources.

IBSS (International Bibliography of Social Science)
Produced by the British Library of Political and Economic Science. One of the largest and most comprehensive social sciences databases in the world, indexing 2600 journals and 6000 books per annum, in the core disciplines of economics, sociology, politics and anthropology.

Lexis Library and Nexis UK (off-campus access by clicking on Login via Academic Sign In and UK federation)
Lexis Library includes full-text access to the vast majority of UK broadsheet and tabloid newspapers and a large number of local papers. Nexis UK provides full-text access to a large number of international newspapers and news sources.

Web of Science Core Collection, including Social Sciences Citation Index
One of the biggest online abstracting and indexing databases. Contains citations and abstracts to millions of journal articles and conference proceedings from all subjects. Impact factors, h-indexes and email alerts available.

The LSE Review of Books has suggested some books related to the European Parliament elections. You can see the full list on their blog but the following are available at the Library, just search the Library Catalogue for the title or author:

How Europe Shapes British Public Policy by Janice Morphet
Lobbying in the European Union: Interest groups, lobbying coalitions, and policy change by Heike Kluver
The Democratic Foundations of Policy Diffusion: How health, family and employment laws spread across countries by Katerina Linos
Right-Wing Populism in Europe: Politics and discourse, edited by Ruth Wodak, Majid KhsraviNik and Brigitte Mral.

Tip: An easy way to find other books on similar subject areas is to click on the “Subjects” listed in the Catalogue record or for print books you can also click on the Shelfmark.

Freely available online resources 

These are just a small number of online resources available:

European Parliament site for the elections
European Parliament/Information Office in the United Kingdom
PollWatch2014
BBC News
EuroVote
London School of Economics EUROPP blog

Caroline Stirling – Academic Support Librarian for Social and Political Science