"Policy" can refer to anything that establishes requirements, legal or otherwise.
Legal policy generally comes from laws, regulations, and court case decisions. These can be federal, state, or even in the example of regulations, municipal.
Sometimes you will have a specific policy in mind that you want to research (i.e. the Affordable Care Act, or Dobbs v Jackson). But often, we have just a topic that we are interested in, and need to find a related specific policy. Here are some tools to help discover policies by topic:
There are no simple, step-by-step instructions that will serve every policy topic folks will want to research. Below are some important tools that I use when doing this kind of research, and how you use them depends on the individual policy. Get in touch for recommendations on the tools that will serve you best!
When I begin research on a particular policy, I usually begin with a Google or Perplexity search, to get basic information - the official policy name and citation info, overview of what it did/does, dates (when it started, when changed, etc.). If I am researching a federal law, I also do advanced searching in CQ Magazine (setting the date parameters a little ahead and a little after the bill became law).
For interpretation, historical background, and implementation effects of a policy, you need to find secondary sources of information. The best analysis usually comes from materials written by scholars, or experts, and published either through a editorial review process, such as books published by academic publishers, or a peer-review process, used by many scholarly journals.
You can search for both books and articles in LibrarySearch, and there are filters, such as peer review for articles, that you can use. Once you've entered a search, sign in with your maine.edu credentials for the most access to full text.
Take a look at our LibrarySearch tutorial to get acquainted with this new system!
While we can search for journal articles in LibrarySearch, there are sometimes benefits to searching in smaller, discipline-based collections, such as with the following library databases:
If you use Google to look for the actual policy (law, case, etc.), make sure the site you use is the appropriate government agency ( Congress, the Supreme Court). Here are some other sources that can assist in finding the actual policy, which is your primary source:
If you are looking for federal government information that is no longer available, here are some possible places to look:
Covers the last four presidential terms
Archived government web sites, prior to Jan 20, 2025
Includes several locations to find recovered data and websites
For your APA assignment, you will need to locate Technical Reports.
Technical reports may be created by a government agency, a non-profit organization, or an educational institution. Unlike journal articles, they don't go through traditional review channels, so you need to know a lot about the entity that produces them (a Google search on that entity can help with this).
In this guide, there are a number of places listed where technical reports can be found, including the Congressional Research Service, the PAIS database (they are listed as Books but look for items that are short in length and published by an organization), and the govinfo site (look at Congressional Committee Materials).
