ABSTRACT
From the anthropologist who is called in to investigate artifacts unearthed during a construction project or a psychologist investigating perceptual problems associated with highway safety to an academic dean trying to establish a form of governance for his college, the social sciences provide many rich avenues for investigation. Because the routes of inquiry are so varied, the literature of the social sciences is likely to be dispersed, a situation offering many challenges to library research projects. The eclectic nature of social science research produces for the student and scholar a morass of terminology, much of it consisting of common words and phrases to which has been applied special meaning. There are several thesauri available for use in profile construction. Although each thesaurus was developed for a specific field, such as political science or education, the overlap in social science disciplines frequently makes a thesaurus developed for one discipline a useful profiling tool for another.
