This video describes PolicyFile, one of the resources the library provides to help you find materials from think tanks and other policy organizations.
You may locate PolicyFile in the alphabetical A–Z database list. You may find it in one of our research guides, or you can go up to the top right-hand corner of the library homepage and type “PolicyFile” in the search box.
Click on “PolicyFile,” and remember that if you are off-campus you will be asked to log in with your “MyNEU username and password.” When PolicyFile opens up, just type in your search; for example, I might be interested in the topic of “sea level rise.” Search that, and you find that we have 120 items on sea level rise.
Over on the left-hand side of the screen, as we have seen in previous videos, there are tools to help you whittle back the number of search results; for example, you could change the date range if you didn’t want to go back to 1992. This resource also has an interesting feature where you can look at type of organization, so for example if you are interested in looking at international organizations or US domestic organizations you could make that distinction. Another interesting feature is the “organizational political leaning.” If you are looking for centrist materials on sea level rise, by selecting the centrist option you would be able to see the group of organizations that are considered to be centrist. This would include the Union of Concerned Scientists, Environmental Law Institute, and the Environmental Defense Fund and so forth. At any point you can go back and remove the filter and go back and change it to a different type of organization.
Another thing that you can do with your search is you can click the “modify search” button at any point, and to make the list a bit smaller you can actually ask for any document where sea level rise appeared in the title. Do that search, and that would give you a smaller list of articles and reports to begin to research. You can see them here.
If you want to read a summary of the report, click on the “abstract.” It looks as if it is something you would like, you can link out to the text here. As you have seen in other resources, you have the ability to email the citation to yourself, save it to citation management software, or if you want to see a sample citation you can look at citation in a number of standard styles used in your courses.