Human Rights: Overview

This guide introduces the basic resources for doing research on human rights. It is intended for beginning students in the social sciences.

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 were the researcher(s)?
• Was there bias in the analysis?
• What was not considered -- what did they ignore or overlook?

And finding, evaluating, using, and citing good quality websites is an absolute necessity. Many organizations (like the U.N. and the Institute for Women's Policy Research) contains current data and only publish on the web.See also the guide prepared by the Dag Hammarskjöld Library at the United Nations: http://www.un.org/Depts/dhl/resguide/spechr.htm

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

http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Pages/WelcomePage.aspx