Current Issues Research - Professor Siler 

You probably already have some statistics from your CQ researcher articles.  Did you notice where CQ Researcher got them? Quite probably from a government source.  The government is a wonderful source for statistics and you can access most government statistical resources easily via the Internet - because... they basically belong to you.  They are produced with your tax dollars after all. Many are also available in print form and can be found in the PSC library as well as on the Internet.

The challenge is knowing where they are.

Some Internet sources for statistics provided by the US government include:

The US Census Bureau - http://www.census.gov/

Statistical Abstracts of the United States - http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/

FedStats - http://www.fedstats.gov/

National Center for Educational Statistics - http://nces.ed.gov/

If you are not sure where to find the stats that you need, try using a statistics directory - a place where real live people put together websites by subject area. 

http://www.refdesk.com/factpop.html

You can always do a general Internet search for "statistics" and whatever you topic is, but... you will have to carefully evaluate the sites.  Anyone can author a web site, you know?

If there are so many government provided resources on the Internet for free, why bother with the databases?  Well... basically you will be getting the same statistics that you woud get from the Internet and print resources, but they are all in one convenient place. 

It does take some time to get comfortable with some of the databases - take a minute to look at the tutorial or help apges before you begin. or... just ask the library staff for assistance.

The LexisNexis Academic Database has a link to Statistical Products. 

Here is a quick "How To" from another college