Reed Library: Getting Started with Research @ Reed Library: Preliminary Research

Getting Started & Organized

Research Guides (By Subject)

Very Short Introductions

Reed Library has an extensive collection of
Very Short Introductions published by Oxford University Press. These books provide succinct introductions (usually under 200 pages) to hundreds of subjects.

Explore the full collection or those available online!

Preliminary Research

It is always a good idea to do some preliminary research, or background research, to help familiarize yourself with a new topic. Reference works, such as encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks, almanacs, etc., are great places to start. The resources provided here are just a sampling and not an exhaustive list of resources you could consult.

Reference Works

Use these as alternatives to Wikipedia:

Britannica Academic
Articles from the Encyclopedia Britannica for college students.
Gale eBooks
A database of encyclopedias and specialized reference sources for multidisciplinary research.
MasterFILE Premier
This multidisciplinary database provides full text for general reference publications, primary source documents, and an image collection of over 453,000 photos, maps, and flags.
Oxford Reference
Includes nearly 300 language and subject reference works from the Oxford Companions and Oxford Dictionaries series, plus the Visual English Dictionary, Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, and Encyclopedia of Mammals.
Salem Reference
Online encyclopedias and other reference works for health, history, literature, and science.
Opposing Viewpoints in Context
Full text articles on social issues. Includes topic overviews, primary sources, statistics, photographs, and podcasts.
Points of View Reference Center
A full-text database designed to provide students with a series of essays that present multiple sides of a current issue.

more reference works databases...

General Databases

Academic OneFile
A source for peer-reviewed, full-text articles from the world's leading journals and reference sources. Has extensive coverage of the physical sciences, technology, medicine, social sciences, the arts, theology, literature, and more.
Academic Search Complete
Find information on almost any topic. Contains the full text of over 4,450 magazines, journals and newspapers, and indexing for many more, with coverage dates back to 1975 for many publications.
Google Scholar
Watch our 30-second video on syncing Google Scholar to retrieve items available through Reed Library.
JSTOR
Provides a comprehensive backfile of major scholarly journals in the arts and sciences, business, ecology, language, literature, and music.

See full database list...

Getting Started with Research @ Reed Library: Preliminary Research

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