Research Guide to Economics

Abstract

Once dismissed as a dismal science, economics has, over a period of three centuries, acquired a respectability, signified quite appropriately by the institution of a separate Nobel prize. It is not any longer a study dealing with the simple laws of supply and demand. Today, it is an extensive and well developed academic discipline with its own specialized branches such as econometrics. Today's student of economics faces the problem common to most other disciplines, namely, proliferation of the subject literature. Luckily for him, there is no dearth of guidebooks and manuals which attempt to teach the beginner the art and science of looking for and finding appropriate information. These include The Uses of Economics Literature, How to Find Out About Economics, Economics and Commerce: The Sources of Information and Their Organization, and Economics: Bibliographic Guide to Reference Books and Information Sources. Any standard textbook would provide an adequate introduction to the basic concepts in the various branches of economics like economic theory, economic history, labor economics, mathematical economics, microeconomics, macroeconomics and price theory. These texts, however, may not contain information on the state of the art in each area. For this purpose, one needs to resort to sources like the AEA Survey of Economic Theory and the Survey of Applied Economics. On a lay level, we have the annual Readings in Economics, which deals with current economic problems, like inflation, unemployment, growth, income distribution, externalities and international economics. Basically, it is a collection of writings dealing with the foundations of economics and its critics. An important recent development in the publication of the state of the art reviews in the various branches of economics will be highlighted in my second annual State‐of‐the‐Art Survey of Reference Materials in Business and Economics. An introductory survey of literature is available from publications such as The Literature of Social Sciences and the Sources of Information in the Social Sciences: A Guide to Literature.

Citation

Balachandran, M. (1977), "Research Guide to Economics", Reference Services Review, Vol. 5 No. 3, pp. 33-37. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb048617