Library Essentials: Topic Guide

Are your sources crappy or not? Finding relevant and useful books and articles are very important when researching a topic. Good sources will give your research credibility, while poor resources will take away from your paper. Evaluate your sources using this test.

The following databases offer in-depth, non-biased coverage of many of today's important issues:

• CQ Researcher
• Issues & Controversies
• World News Digest
• TOPICsearch
  

If you are studying opposing viewpoints of a local topic, be sure to consult the Researching Local Issues LibGuide. 

Stuck in your searches? Keywords are the key to effective searches:

Hello! This guide is intended as a companion to my class instruction on library research. Similar to an electronic handout, this guide contains links to the library resources introduced in class (and possibly a few more).

Remember to ask your librarian for help! Happy research and discovery!

Source: NASA/Tracy Caldwell Dyson, via Wikimedia Commons

Begin your research by searching for background information on your topic, using one of the Reference Databases listed below.

Using Books for Research

• Be sure to notice the book's publication date. Oftentimes statistics or current issues published in books become outdated quickly. Rely on books more for background information and topic history.
  
  
• Keep in mind that effective research does not always require that you read a book cover to cover. In fact, a book with information related to your topic may be mostly focused on other topics.
  
  
• You can easily find an introductory chapter that lays out the book's basic premise and a concluding chapter that gives a summary of the argument. At the very least, try to read these sections.

Print Book Collection

• Voyager - UHMC's collection of reference and circulating books housed in the campus library. Mobile interface. 
  
  

Electronic Book Collections

• ebrary - UHMC Library's subscription to more than 70,000 academic, full-text ebooks.
  
  Watch a quick walkthrough of ebrary:
  

The library has several different databases available for you to use for your research. EBSCOhost is a database of databases -- this means when you do a search, Ebsco is searching through numerous different databases to find your results. This can yeild a lot of potential articles, so narrowing down your search is important.

Watch this walkthrough of Ebsco's Academic Search Complete: