The University of Montana Libraries—Missoula

Research Guide for PSC366 The American Presidency, Fall 06

Welcome to the library website! This guide is intended to help you with your research on historical rankings of American Presidents.

Evaluating Web Resources:
Some of your research for this class will take place on the general internet as opposed to library resources. The library has a guide to evaluating information found on the open web. At the end of this guide is a short checklist to use when evaluating a website.

Citing Web Resources:
Figuring out how to properly cite a web resource can be difficult. Follow the pattern below for an APA style citation:

Last Name, I. (year, date). Title of document. Retrieved date, year, from Title of Web Site: http://www.complete/webaddress.org

So to cite a page I found on Google about political forecasting, it would look like this:

Armstrong, J.S, Collopy, F., & Green, K. C. (2006). Answers to Frequently-Asked Questions: Evidence-Based Forecasting. Retrieved Sept. 27, 2006 from PoliticalForecasting.com: http://mktg-sun.wharton.upenn.edu/forecast/FAQ.html

Often you may have trouble determining who wrote a particular web page, or when they wrote it. If you absolutely can't find the information, skip over that part of the citation outline. Things you will ALWAYS include are the date you viewed the site and the URL (web site address).

If you have any trouble or confusion figuring out how to properly cite a website, you can ask a librarian for help, either in person at the Information Center, by calling us at 243-6866, by email or via chat.

Resources to Try
Most of you have already discovered that Wikipedia has an excellent entry on Historical rankings of United States Presidents. There are questions as to the suitability of using Wikipedia as a research source, however, as anyone can add to or change an entry. You can get around these concerns by consulting with and confirming information through the references and external links at the bottom of the article.

I've compiled a number of the books mentioned in the Wikipedia article on library reserve for this course. You can find a list of them here. They check out for one day from the library's circulation desk.

You can also search for articles rating, ranking and comparing American Presidents in the library's online political science resources. You will probably have the best initial success in popular literature like newspapers and magazines, which can be found in Academic Index, Academic Search Premier, Lexis Nexis Academic, and OmniFile Full Text Mega. Once you find out some information about a particular study, like who conducted it, when, and at what institution, the academic article about the study can be easily tracked down as well in these resources or in more discipline-specific resources like Worldwide Political Science Abstracts.

Help!
If you need help, please feel free to contact the Social Sciences Librarian, Samantha Hines.
Email: Samantha.Hines@umontana.edu | Phone: 243-4558
Yahoo IM: Sam_MLUM | AOL IM: MansfieldLib | GTalk: samhines