The Econlit online database is the richest source of information about research in Economics. It covers work going back to 1969. The database is searchable by keywords, and many of the research papers, books, and unpublished papers indexed in Econlit have abstracts available online. There are also book reviews. A facility with using Econlit can be considered a CRITICAL skill for economists at all levels.

NOTE: these directions were valid as of January 23, 1998. If the UCLA library changes the structure of their web site, you may have to make adaptations

If you have your own access to the Web via BruinOnline, you will want to commit this website to a bookmark, for easier reference. If you work on different machines each time, and do not want to memorize the closest UCLA-based URL, you can always follow these steps:

1. Go to http://www.ucla.edu
2. Click on Libraries, currently on the lower right part of the page
3. Scroll down to "Libraries & Archives" and select UCLA Library
4. Scroll down to "Library Collections & Resources" and select Collections & Internet Resources by Discipline
5. You may wish to note that the UCLA web page location closest to the Econlit link is http://www.library.ucla.edu/ cird/index.htm#Hum
6. Scroll down to "Selected UCLA Networked Resources" and select Econlit (Index to Economic Literature; includes abstracts). The minute you do this, you leave UCLA-space and access Silverplatter-space. Since a site license is required to access this database, you must come in via UCLA to gain access. Also, the number of simultaneous connections is limited, so you may have to wait and try again later if there is congestion.

1. For database selection, we subscribe only to Econlit, so click on this box, and then select Search.
2. In your initial search, just click on the space for typing search instructions and enter, for example, immigration and wages.
3. If you wanted to get citations for both immigration and immigrant and immigrants, as well as wage and wages, you could use immigra* and wag*. You can also use "or," if that is what you mean.
4. There are many things you can learn about different types of searches by reading the online help associated with the program. It is well worth your time to figure this out.
5. As you look through the citations that the software finds for you, you can "mark" them and either print them or save them to a disk.