Applied Economics and Statistics

Resources in this guide are intended to support the study and teaching of Applied Economics and Statistics, covering food and agribusiness marketing and management, environmental and resource economics (ecological economics, resource policy), and biological and agricultural statistics (foundations of inference, collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of data).

Included in this guide are catalogs, databases, and web resources for finding information in a variety of formats (books and encyclopedias, articles and journals, film and video).

Choose a research topic that interests you. Once you have thought of a topic, try stating it in the form of a question. This will help to narrow your topic and focus upon the aspect of the topic that you are going to research. So if you first thought of writing about economics and food products, try stating it in the form of a question: "How do the costs of agricultural inputs affect the price of vegetable food products?"

Reading an overview of your topic from a general source such as an encyclopedia provides background information, key words, and often a list of books and articles for further reading. Use the background information you located to determine key words or phrases that might be used to describe your topic. You may want to focus on a particular commodity (corn) or a particular aspect of economics (land values). You can use these keywords to search for books or articles in magazines, journals or newspapers.