Finding and Exploring Your Topic: Understanding
Your Topic
Try These Databases
The CQ Researcher publishes reports 44 times a year that offer in-depth single-topic coverage of political and social issues, with regular reports on topics in health, international affairs, education, the environment, technology and the U.S. economy. Each CQ Researcher report is investigated and written by a seasoned journalist. Editors identify the topic to be investigated, then the writer conceives its content, formulating the key questions that it will seek to answer; reads background material; interviews a range of sources; synthesizes available information; and writes the report. The report's writer quotes a range of sources, including lawmakers, academics, interest group representatives, government officials as well as citizens involved in the issue. The report concludes with a bibliography that contains an annotated list of key sources.
Credo Reference provides access to full-text, aggregated reference content covering a variety of major subject areas. The database contains well over 3,000,000 full-text entries in over 500 reference books, collected from more than 70 publishers. The entries are drawn from encyclopedias, dictionaries, biographies, quotations, and other sources. Credo is designed as a research tool and provides the ability to search, map, save, organize, and cross-reference the information in the collection.
Understanding Your Topic
The resources on this page will help you find out background information about your topic. You can use this information to further develop your paper's argument, or to learn enough about the topic to begin to narrow it down into a manageable paper topic.
Encyclopedias
- Encyclopedia Britannica Online Academic EditionEncyclopedia Britannica Online Academic Edition provides access to the online content of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which is a scholarly, English-language encyclopedia aimed at educated adults, and written by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 expert contributors. The content of the Encyclopedia is updated regularly as new information is added.
- Encyclopedia of LifeThis database is a collaboration between several institutions (Biodiversity Heritage Library, Field Museum of Natural History, Harvard University, Marine Biological Laboratory, Missouri Botanical Garden and Smithsonian Institution) and many contributors, which focus on describing the approximate 1.8 million known species of life on earth. Information on a given species will usually include taxonomy, geographic distribution, collections, genetics, evolutionary history, morphology, behavior, ecological relationships, and importance for human well being. The encyclopedia is an ongoing project with new species and information being continuously added.
- International Encyclopedia of CommunicationThe International Encyclopedia of Communication contains information related to communication studies, including coverage of theories, media and communication phenomena, research methods, problems, concepts, and geographical areas. The content of the Encyclopedia is largely focused on communication theory and philosophy, interpersonal communication, journalism, intercultural and intergroup communication, media effects, strategic communication, public relations and advertising, communication and media law and policy, media systems in the world, and communication and technology. Each major subject is overseen by an expert in the field, with new entries added periodically. The Encyclopedia currently contains over 1300 entries.
- Literary EncyclopediaWritten by over 1400 specialists from universities around the world, and currently providing over 3700 authoritative profiles of authors, works and literary and historical topics, with plans to publish at least 800 new profiles (1.6m words) in 2007. They list nearly 19,000 works by date, country and genre, and provide advanced software tools.
- Other J. Willard Marriott Library EncyclopediasLinks to over a dozen encyclopedias in the library's collections.
- Oxford Reference OnlineBrings together language and subject reference works from Oxford Press into a single cross-searchable resource. Retrieve short and long subject reference entries, bilingual dictionaries, English dictionaries, and quotations & proverbs.
Subject Guide
Liaison to the College of Education,
2nd Floor Library, Room 2110M
Orcid: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9981-5757