Informational Sources
Quick reference sources include scholarly encyclopedias for backgrounds and overviews, almanacs of facts, statistical compilations, atlases containing maps, specialized dictionaries, and more. They can be great to launch and supplement a research project, but are not normally sufficient in themselves to be the entire basis for a research project.
Articles in periodicals and newspapers are relatively brief in length, and include current news reports, popular feature articles in magazines, and reports of academic research in peer-reviewed scholarly journals.
Books may go into much greater depth on a given topic. They are often written by a single author, but they may also be compilations of chapters by many different authors.
Quick Reference
Reference sources can be recommended by a librarian, they can be found in the Library Catalog, or you may want to try Reference Universe...
- Reference Universe (Paratext) This link opens in a new windowA single, centralized access point to much of Murphy Library's reference collection (online and print subject encyclopedias, handbooks, compendia), allowing you to deeply search within the collection through tables of contents and actual back of the book indexes. Link directly into the work if available online. Covers 5,400 titles held by Murphy Library, and about 45,000 reference works total. Tutorial video
Periodicals and Newspapers
The library offers dozens of databases for finding articles in journals, magazines, and/or newspapers.
A big, broad, general-purpose article database such as Academic Search Ultimate may suit your purposes for this class.
- Academic Search Ultimate (EBSCO) @ EBSCOhost This link opens in a new window
This link opens in a new window
A comprehensive database containing full-text academic journals, magazines and periodicals plus reports, books and videos covering virtually every discipline. Includes thousands of English-language and native-language full-text journals from Asia, Oceania, Europe and Latin America.
Books
A library catalog is the complete inventory of the information resources held in a library collection.
Library catalogs list books, e-books, videos, e-resources, periodical subscriptions (but not the articles contained in periodicals), government documents, maps, and more.