SOFIS - Social Science Research Information System

SOFIS offers information on theoretical and empirical research projects in the following disciplines:

Additionally, SOFIS covers further interdisciplinary areas of the social sciences, such as, for example, research on women, research on leisure, gerontology, social welfare, criminology (see also social science classification).

Contents and updates

SOFIS contains descriptions of planned, on-going and completed (in the last 10 years) research projects from the Federal Republic of Germany, from Austria and Switzerland (more than 44,500 records in May 2008).

The comprehensive collection of the SOFIS database, comprising the last ten years, is accessible via the hosts STN International and GENIOS German Business Information resp. the wiso-net (subscriptions to universities) as well as via sowiport.

Around 6,000 records per year are added to or updated in the current version of the database. The proportion of new project references is high: approximately two-thirds of the projects are, at the moment of data entry, still in progress; the remaining third have just been finished. Project descriptions are often already in the database and searchable at a point before any results based on the work have been published. SOFIS is therefore an instrument through which one can get information on the most current research activities, and can identify developments and trends in the social sciences.

Information Sources

Project information in SOFIS comes primarily from the higher education sector. Research from the non-university sector is included only insofar as the results from that research may be published in the open literature and not - as is so often the case with market and opinion research - designed only for the commissioning agency.

Substantial sources of information are surveys at institutions doing social science research. In the Federal Republic of Germany the survey is carried out by the GESIS, in Switzerland by FORS (Swiss Foundation for Research in Social Sciences), in Austria till 2001 by the University Library of Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, and now by WISDOM (Wiener Institut für Sozialwissenschaftliche Dokumentation und Methodik). The results of the GESIS survey are extended by social science information from specialised documentation institutions, such as, for example, the Federal Environmental Agency. Further extensions result from the evaluation of internet sources, higher education reports as well as annual reports of central funding sources and foundations.