Human Rights: Overview

This guide introduces the basic resources for conducting research on human rights. It is intended for beginning social science students. Included in this guide are many types of information sources. To thoroughly research a topic in Human Rights, you need to have skills in assessing the reliability of the information you are looking at.

• Who did the research?
• How large (or small) was the participant group?
• How inclusive or exclusive was the researcher(s)?
• Was there bias in the analysis?
• What was not considered -- what did they ignore or overlook?

Finding, evaluating, using, and citing high-quality websites is an absolute necessity. Many organizations (like the U.N. and the Institute for Women's Policy Research) contain current data and only publish on the web. See also the Human Rights guide prepared by the Dag Hammarskjöld Library at the United Nations.

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights is also useful.