IBSS case study on Monetary policy

Case study title	Monetary Policy and Inflation
Name	Juljan Krause
Job title	Editorial Assistant
Institution	IBSS
Qualifications	BSc (Hons) Economics;  MSc Economics

I am searching IBSS in order to retrieve publications which examine how monetary authorities, i.e. central banks in most cases, try to control inflation – how successful they are in doing so, what kinds of policy measures they employ, and what economic theory suggests to stabilise overall price levels.

For a first overview, I am searching for “inflation” and “monetary policy”  :

This yields the massive number of 1,682 results. I am primarily interested in the most recent articles published in this field, so I therefore limit my search accordingly by Publication Type:

This option to limit to articles proves very useful indeed: it narrows the number of hits down to 812, which, however, is still too large. The scope of the entire search is to find papers on central bank politics, and searching for “central banks” retrieves more than 4,000 records. But, combining these two searches was simple:

The result is a more manageable 228 records. Research on monetary economics tends to focus predominantly on the US – the largest economy by far. However, against the background of ever-increasing economic integration in Europe and a growing interest among academics in monetary cooperation in Asia, it is most interesting to check for papers published in a language other than English.

Therefore, I choose to limit the search further to non-English publications:

Astonishingly, IBSS holds 41 records of articles which deal with “central banks” and “monetary policy” and “inflation” published in a language other than English, all published in 2000 or later – conveniently, an English translation is also included for all foreign languages titles:

Alternatively, by combing the same search again with the search term “USA” and limiting the search to works published in English only results in 22 records,  pretty much exactly what the search intended to find. The comprehensive results page proved particularly helpful to have a quick look at all records in set, before actually going through them in detail by clicking on the Complete Reference link:

All in all, combining a couple of easy steps retrieved a good number of highly accurate hits. The amount of economic research on monetary aspects is immense - accuracy, in this case, is of much greater importance than simply providing the user with as many hits as possible. Therefore a good job done!

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