If you discover a book that is not available in the Library, and would be useful for your assignment, dissertation or research, ask the Library to purchase it. We rely on our students and staff to help build up diverse and relevant collections across the social sciences, so please put the details of the book on the book suggestion form 

The majority of books are now available in ebook format and can usually be acquired quite quickly. Books can also be purchased in print format if you prefer.

Dictionaries and encyclopaedias are helpful places to start your research, as they define & clarify concepts and terminology. Good encyclopaedias will usefully summarise a topic, and many offer suggestions for further reading.

Rather than use free Web sources (which are often unreliable), you could use the range of reference books at HB 61 on floor 3. The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics has excellent articles, and is also available online (and regularly updated):

SpringerLink is also a useful resource. Springer is a major academic publisher in Economics & Finance, and we have access to reference works in the Humanities & Social Sciences. Some of these encyclopedias are "living reference works" which are regularly updated with new content.

Open access dictionaries that may be of limited use:

For the social sciences more broadly, consult this excellent resource:

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. 2nd ed. (Elsevier: 2015)

After looking at reference material you might want to learn about a topic in a bit more depth, and books are a good starting point, as they are usually more suitable than journal articles for establishing an understanding of a topic.

Academic books come in various flavours and include:
1. Introductory textbooks
These are often referred to on your reading lists and you can find a great selection in the Student Collection on Floor 1, as well as online

2. Short books
These have become popular in recent years, as they are cheaper & faster to publish, often deal with contemporary topics that are appealing to students, and are quicker to read! The Library has purchased all of the Oxford Very Short Introductions series, which cover all subject areas, but there are many other examples available in print or online.

3. Handbooks
These can be highly useful, as they summarise research across a broad subject area and its subfields. A very useful resource that the Library subscribes to is the highly regarded series Handbooks in Economics, published by Elsevier, and these are available on the ScienceDirect database. Many others are available from publishers including Routledge, Edward Elgar, Springer Palgrave, etc. Use "handbook" as a keyword in library search to find them

4. Monographs and Edited Collections
Monographs are just scholarly books written by an academics, and are useful if you need to pursue a topic in more depth. Good examples of these can be found through the library search & browsing the shelves, and the library subscribes to the Oxford Scholarship Online collection of ebooks in Economics.
Edited collections have chapters written by different authors that relate to the title or theme of the book as a whole, and you might find that selected chapters from edited books are relevant to your topic.

For 2022/23 we have access to almost all ebooks (as well as most journal content) from two major publishers in the social sciences:

Cambridge University Press on their Cambridge Core platform
Springer on their SpringerLink platform 

Individual book titles from these publishers are listed in library search, but searching on the publisher platform enables you to do a more detailed search for specific content. 

Another useful source that we subscribe to is OECDiLibrary. We have access to all publications that the OECD produces. Although not academic books as such, they offer high quality insights into many of the topics of interest to economists.

The library search does include the contents (i.e. chapter details) of some books, but not all. Google Books or Amazon Book Search can be helpful in finding out the contents details of specific books. Browsing the library shelves is a really good way of doing this too, as books on similar topics are shelved together.

Open Access textbooks are still unusual in Economics, but there are some, including:

Advanced macroeconomics : an easy guide by Campante, Sturzenegger & Velasco (LSE Press, 2021)

The library search does include the contents (i.e. chapter details) of some books, but not all. Google Books or Amazon Book Search can be helpful in finding out the contents details of specific books. Browsing the library shelves is also a good way of finding relevant material, as books on similar topics are shelved together. Economics books are mostly shelved on floor 3, with reading list books on floor 1 (Student Collection). A summary of the classification is given below.