Social Science Services

• Research Consultations

• Tutorials and Subject Guides

• Workshops

• Course Integration

Students, faculty, and staff can meet with a librarian for in-depth, one-on-one research assistance, or can ask us basic questions via email and chat. Contact us at socscilibrarians@brown.edu. We can help with:

• Search strategies and finding sources to support coursework and research
• Learning and using specialized library databases
• Citation practices and collaborative reference management
• Identifying sources for statistical data (demographic, geographic, socio-economic, financial) and navigating data repositories
• Planning a strategy for longer-term research projects
• Writing data management and sharing plans for sponsored research
• Compliance with publishers' data public access policies

We publish resource guides around specific topics, databases, and courses to provide users with suggestions on how to get started with their research, and recommendations for high-quality resources in the library and on the web. We also create how-to documents and course handouts for using various databases, datasets, and software packages.

Social Science Subject and Topic Guides

Throughout the semester, we will provide workshops that introduce users to specific datasets, software tools, and library resources via the library's workshop program.

Our expert librarians are available to partner with you to design custom workshops, online library instruction modules, identify course materials, discuss learning outcomes and assignments for courses and institutes.

Course Visits

Instructors can invite librarians to their courses to give lectures and demonstrations on library services. We can provide:

• Basic orientation for library resources, search strategies, and information literacy concepts
• Demonstrations of particular library databases, special collections, and data resources tied to specific themes and objectives of the class

Request a course consultation