The Missouri Legislative Library has compiled the following directory of free online resources for public policy research. Category areas below include Academic Papers and Grey Literature, Legislation Tracking, Data and Statistics, Directories, Historical Research, and Legal Research.
Academic Papers and Grey Literature
The Legislative Library recommends the following free online resources for locating additional public policy academic publishing and grey literature.
Education Resources Information Center (Eric)
ERIC is an online library of education research and information, sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U.S. Department of Education.
PubMed Central
PubMed Central® (PMC) is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM)
PubAg
SEARCH is the USDA National Agricultural Library’s main search tool. It provides simple, one-stop access to more than 8 million records covering all aspects of agriculture and related disciplines.
Democracy’s Library
Democracy's Library brings together more than 700 collections from over 50 government organizations, archived by the Internet Archive since 2006.
EconBiz
EconBiz is an academic search portal for journals, working papers, and conferences in business studies and economics.
WorldWideScience
WorldWideScience.org is a global science search engine designed to accelerate scientific discovery and progress by accelerating the sharing of scientific knowledge.
FindPolicy
Search across leading think tanks in a policy area. Search engines within FindPolicy include: Climate, Economy, Development, Foreign Policy, and general Public Policy. There are also country-level and regional searches.
Legislation Tracking
The Legislative Library recommends the following free online resources for bill tracking in the Missouri Legislature and other statewide legislatures.
The Legislative Library recommends the following free online resources for statistical research.
U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts
The QuickFacts data access tool provides users with easy access to basic population, business, and geography statistics for all states and counties, and for cities and towns with more than 5,000 people.
Census Reporter
Census Reporter is an independent project to make data from the American Community Survey (ACS) easier to use.
Missouri Census Data Center
The Missouri Census Data Center (MCDC) is a cooperative program among state agencies in Missouri and the U.S. Bureau of the Census. Its purpose is to enhance awareness of and access to public data, especially Census Bureau products.
USAFacts
Non-partisan, not-for-profit resource of numbers and trends in government spending using government data from over 70 sources.
Pew Research Center
A nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world.
FindLaw
Are you facing a legal issue, or just looking for more information about a specific legal topic? FindLaw's Learn About the Law section is the perfect starting point. Learn About the Law features informational articles about a wide variety of legal topics, as well as specific information about subjects such as how to hire an attorney and understanding your state's unique laws.
Wex Legal Dictionary and Encyclopedia
Wex is a free legal dictionary and encyclopedia sponsored and hosted by the Legal Information Institute at the Cornell Law School.
The Indigo Book
The Indigo Book is a resource for legal citations in standard legal documents.
Caselaw Access Project
The Caselaw Access Project (“CAP”) expands public access to U.S. law. Our goal is to make all published U.S. court decisions freely available to the public online in a consistent format, digitized from the collection of the Harvard Law School Library.
CourtListener
CourtListener is a free legal research website containing millions of legal opinions from federal and state courts. With CourtListener, lawyers, journalists, academics, and the public can research an important case, stay up to date with case law as it develops, or do deep analysis using our raw data.