Maritime Economics: Home

Conducting research into maritime economics may come in many different forms.  You may research an individual, an issue, a company, the impact of a historical event, or just want to keep current and acquaint yourself with what is going on in the industry.  Whatever the reason, the resources and methodology presented here in this research guide are meant to provide a good authoritative introduction, but not necessarily be completely exhaustive listing of methods and resources.  If at any point you need any kind of assistance, the staff of the Library is here to assist.

1. If this is a project based assignment with well defined requirements, the first step is to fully read and understand what those requirements are.  That will give a good overview of what the project itself entails and directly lead into highlighting and extracting out any important words or descriptors.  These can be named people, topics, issues, or other relevant keywords that you judge as important.
2. Once there is a solid initial understanding of the project, it is now time to move to the next step.  The thought process for this next step also encompasses the more open ended research projects where the topic may be more self selected or just a desire to keep with events that may be effect the economics of the maritime industry itself.  It is not time to start browsing and reading articles in maritime focused newspapers and magazines.  Key entry point resources have been identified in this research guide.  This is not normal reading where an article or a blog post is read and then you move on.  The point is to try and make this a little focused, to both allow for exploration and at the same time focusing on articles that are relevant. 
3. When particularly relevant or interesting articles are found, then it is necessary to take notes.  From this point on it is handy to have a notebook, notepad, Word file, something available to take notes in, or another system that works for you.  When reading the article notice and write down important phrases, numbers, topics.  This should be a little familiar to everyone.  The little bit of added complexity here is to also take note of any people that are mentioned or interviewed and any organizations, such as companies, federal agencies, or non-governmental organizations, that are mentioned.  Also, find out what the relevant regulatory agencies and note what they are; they may be local, state, federal, or international.  This specific type of technique is known as Term Harvesting.  The words, phrases and thoughts you begin to pull out of the articles will hopefully start to coalesce into your research topic and initial beginnings of the research process.
4. Now that you have better sense of a research focus, the deeper and more advanced research tools can now begin to be used with the terms that had been harvested.  This includes resources listed in the Maritime Statistics and Data Portals in this guide, KP Scholar (https://usmma.on.worldcat.org/discovery), Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com/), and some of the more niche research databases mentioned in this research guide as well.  As you begin to conduct searches and look at the results also notice what kind of filters each database has, these can allow you better sort and order the results being returned.  For instance, there is the ability in many databases to restrict by publication date or by content type like mass market fiction or peer reviewed.
5. It is also advisable look at the local Federal Reserve Banks to see if any of them have done any local studies based upon the terms that have been harvested already.  Federal Reserve Banks frequently do a lot of studies and analysis, some of which may definitely be economically relevant.  
6. Each new result needs to be read and reviewed for additional relevant leads and terms.  For particularly scholarly results you decide to include in your research, there is an additional technique known as Citation Mining.  This is the practice of using the citations located in the bibliography to dig up results that are likely to be highly relevant to your research.  In essence, you are going backwards in time to see what sources the author(s) utilized when writing their research article.  Forward citation mining also exists, this is a way of looking forward in time to see what scholarly articles used your article in their bibliography.  This option is usually most prevalent in Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com/) 'cited by' feature.
7. While conducting all this research it is imperative to be organized and keep all the relevant research, citations, and harvested search terms all in one place. In a large, complex project organization is the key to keep yourself from getting overloaded or letting the search results spiral out of control.  Part of a good research strategy is knowing when you are done and to stop or when to double back.

All of the resources listed here provide access to statistical data in various forms from very large datasets to the work of singular companies in very granular details.  These are not resources to use at the beginning of the research process when a topic or idea is not well formed.  Everything here is best utilized when the question or research topic is well understood, this will make it much easier to find the valuable information to analyze in these large agglomerations of data.  This lets you more effectively search for data that can support the entire research endeavor in various ways.

All of the titles listed here are magazines that are recommended for the quality of their coverage of the maritime industry and their link to maritime economic research.  Port Technology is physically located within the library, while Hellenic Shipping News, Freight Waves, and Maritime Executive are all easily accessible online.  These are titles that are good when beginning the research process and as searchable resources unto themselves