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SOSIG: Social Science Information Gateway

SOSIG is part of the Resource Discovery Network, an excellent collection of subject guides of the best web research sites. As with the rest of RDN, SOSIG is designed primarily for academics, students and researchers, and its catalogue of sites is built by librarians and academicians.

SOSIG's scope is surprisingly broad; there are sections on business, law, politics, sociology, statistics, and environmental science, among others. Each section or -for the broad categories such as Business - sub-section is organised by type of resource, including Editor's Choice, Papers/Reports/Articles, Discussion Lists, Journals, Companies, Reference Materials, Data, and Governmental Bodies. A particularly useful feature is the link with information on the person or group responsible for maintaining that section, along with a form for submitting new sites to that area of SOSIG.

You can search SOSIG entries by key word, including geographic terms. Since this is a global resource, you may wish to include "Australia" or "New Zealand" in your search if you just want local resources. You can also browse the resources, by drilling down through the hierarchical categories or by scanning the alphabetical list of subjects.

SOSIG also provides a very useful thesaurus, something seldom found in Web directories. Type the text string "econ" in the thesaurus search box, for example, and you will be able to review all the economic-related subject terms, and select just the ones on which you want to search.

In addition to the human-built catalogue of resources, SOSIG has a specialised search engine of about 50,000 social science related web pages. There isn't an obvious link to the search engine from SOSIG's main page, but you can click here to directly to it. Interestingly, the SOSIG search engine supports truncation (although it must be applied to all words in the search), and will rank the search results by the number of times the search words appear on the web page. When available, the description and keywords from the page's metadata are displayed in the search results. Note that the only web sites spidered by SOSIG's search engine are those that have been included in the SOSIG directory.

SOSIG has also built the Grapevine, a section of its site that includes social science related conferences, events and courses. There is also a LikeMinds area, in which SOSIG participants can register their interests and links to their web pages and CVs. Looking for someone who is passionate about corporate social responsibility? LikeMinds lists ten SOSIG users who share your interest.

Consider SOSIG the next time you need reliable sources in the social sciences; this is one resource that deserves a place in your toolkit.

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