PEP

This site provides access to online literature search tools and online access to a huge number of top scholarly journals (with downloadable articles). All members of teams who currently benefit from a PEP or IDRC/MIMAP grant are eligible to receive access to IDRC's Research Databases. The databases collection of the IDRC Library is a resource intended to support the research activities of grant recipients by providing access to a wealth of scholarly literature - a portion of which is full text. To access the research databases, you must have at a minimum, Windows 95 and Internet Explorer, version four. More information about these databases and other services provided through the IDRC Library is available at the following webpage: http://web.idrc.ca/en/ev-45342-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html.

These services are available to researchers over the full duration of their research project. For those who are interested and who have not already received a username and password, please submit an updated list of the names and email addresses of the persons from your research team who will use the service. For PEP grant recipients, this information should be transmitted to the PEP secretariat (pep@ecn.ulaval.ca). The names of these people should accord with those identified as research team members in your proposal document. This information will be transmitted to the IDRC librarian, who will provide each team member with a username and password, and she will notify you directly as soon as this has been accomplished. She will also elaborate on the full range of services offered through the Library.

GDN supports the generation and sharing of local social science research by providing a number of web and email based services to help researchers produce, share and disseminate their work. This page gives an overview to help researchers make the most of these services.

Access to Data: Through the GDN Data initiative, researchers in low and middle income countries can get access to datasets to support the quality of their research and analysis.
Director of Free online Journals
Journal service: Access to journals for researchers working in low and middle income countries.
Funding Information: A range of funding information services carrying up-to-date news of grants, fellowships and other funding opportunities, specially selected for relevance to social science researchers.
Toolkits: GDNet produces toolkits to share knowledge and experience on key topics. Providing practical, hands-on advice compiled from a range of sources from best practice literature to interviews with individuals experienced in that area, each has been specially written to cover areas of particular interest to researchers in developing countries.

2. Sites with free downloadable papers

SSRN: The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is a publicly accessible site that gathers academic discussion papers and forthcoming publications (30,000 abstracts and 15,000 downloadable papers) from a huge number of first-rate economics departments and research centres (NEBR, CEPR, IZA, etc.). This is a great site to get the very latest research papers. As they are extremely recent, their bibliographies are excellent starting points for a literature survey. The search facility is straightforward. You can also subscribe to receive email updates on specific subject areas but there may be a fee for this.

World Bank: Select Research and Working Papers (under "key outputs"). Alternatively, you can go directly to http://econ.worldbank.org/resource.php?type=5. This site includes World Bank Working Papers and has a straightforward search facility. Once again, many papers can be downloaded free of charge directly from the site.

REPEC: This sites groups together a number of search tools, including IDEAS, which includes roughly 130,000 articles and working papers, many of which can be downloaded, plus many software programs and add-ons. The site also includes WOPEC, which contains 36,000 downloadable papers.

NBER: The NBER publishes a huge working paper series (close to 9000 papers) in all fields of economics. Access is free for most developing countries upon written (email) request.

JSTOR: This site allows subscribers to download articles from 13 top economic journals (AER; Econometrica; JEL; JEP; Journal of Industrial Economics; Journal of Money, Credit and Banking; Journal of Political Economy; QJE; Review of Economic Studies; Review of Economics and Statistics) with a three- to five-year lag depending on the journal (i.e. you can download all publications before 1997 from the Review of Economics Studies).

Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.

SAGE: This is a database of studies using applied general equilibrium models. It was created to disseminate studies AGE models built throughout the world and provide students, researchers, professors and civil servants with a quick and powerful tool for accessing references to AGEs according to the country studied, the subject of analysis and the specific approaches used. It provides modelers with references to over 600 published and unpublished studies from throughout the world. References indicate the studies' title, authors, year of publication, source (name of journal, etc.), document type, keywords and the abstract or resume if available. The database may be searched with a combination of JEL keywords (listed in an instruction page) and/or author names.

Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI): This is also an excellent search tool for finding economics papers covering most economic journals. It has the added advantage of allowing searches by citations so that starting from a classic (oft-cited) paper, you can trace research forward to see who has done more recent research on the issue.