Economic and Financial Literature at Princeton University 

Princeton University Library consists of many libraries both on and off campus. While the largest number of materials related to economics and finance are located in Firestone Library, other materials may be found in other libraries. The primary tool for locating if Princeton owns a particular book or subscribes to a journal is the Main Catalog. Once you locate a particular title, note the location and the call number.  Some of the locations you will encounter most often are:

• F Firestone stacks
• SSRC Social Science Reference Center
• PF Economics unbound journals (located in SSRC)
• SXF Economics reference materials (located in SSRC)
• IR Industrial Relations Collection
• PR Periodicals Reading Room
• STOKES Stokes Library
• ST Engineering Library
• Annex A (located off campus; you must request items and they will be retrieved for you)
• RECAP (located off campus; you must request items by using the popup button that appears in the Main Catalog records for items stored in RECAP.

If Princeton does not own an item, Interlibrary Services can borrow the book or obtain a copy of the article for you. If the item is a book and it is checked out or not owned by Princeton, try Borrow Direct first. It is a very fast way of getting books from Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, University of Pennsylvania, or Yale.

While the Main Catalog will tell you if Princeton owns a particular book, OCLC Worldcat will show you what other libraries own.

When looking for economic literature, it is important to remember the time line of publishing. If something happens today, you will first hear about it on the news, the Internet, and in newspapers. If the event is a major one, it may then show up in the weekly magazines such as The Economist or Business Week. Scholars will begin to do research and first present their findings in working papers which are generally unpublished but will show up on the World Wide Web or through stapled paper documents. Eventually (often one to two years later), these working papers will be published in scholarly journals. Eventually books may appear. This timeline should help with determining whether or not one is likely to find books or other standard published materials OR if one will have to look at more unconventional forms of publishing. Finding books is relatively straightforward and can usually be found by using the Main Catalog. The rest of this guide addresses finding working papers, journals, and newspaper articles.

When getting started, useful sources are the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and Finance (scholarly, signed articles), Handbooks in Economics (definitive essays on major fields of economics), Annual Review of Economics, Annual Review of Financial Economics, and Annual Review of Resource Economics (reviews of the literature in each field for the year).  Additional sources can be found on the Princeton University Library "articles and databases" page.