Faculty Librarians are designated librarians for your faculty, who can offer specialized help on your course assignment and research project. Make an appointment with your Faculty Librarian for in-depth assistance!
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Contact your Faculty Librarians on in-depth research questions |
You can start by reading background information on your topic and developing your terminology around the topic.
Full Video: 00:43
Overview of the research gathering process used to support a thesis or hypothesis. Includes questions students may ask to draw conclusions based on their research findings.
Reference works include Dictionaries, Encyclopedias, Handbooks. They provide authoritative summary information on a field or subject.
Reading articles published in reference works help you:
Below are some recommended sources where you can find reference works. Try searching your topic in any of these sources and see if you can find any interesting articles and further expand your terminology.
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Credo Reference helps you find short articles on a topic from thousands of reference books in different disciplines. It's the scholarly version of Wikipedia. Here you can see an example. After searching the topic, we got a few articles (and sometimes a mind map too) related to the topic.
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SAGE Knowledge is another database to find published reference works. If you wish to explore a topic in more details, you can read more from these handbooks and encyclopedia articles.
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OneSearch is library's search engine where you can find almost everything the Library has including books, journals, DVDs. You can use OneSearch to search the reference works too. Run a search on your topic and limit by "Reference Entries". Clicking on the search result will bring you to the article published in reference works.
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| Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia. It's a great tool to help you quickly get an overview of a topic and understand the key issues or latest debates.
Sometimes students may come up with this question: Should I use Wikipedia for research?The short answer is, yes you can. However, you need to:
Below is a snapshot of an Wikipedia article's reference list, with a few creditable sources highlighted.
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You will be given a research topic for your assignment. Try searching the topic on Google and check the result list - you may see entries from newspapers, Wikipedia or other sources.
At this stage, you can do 3 things:
If you wish to find more news articles on a topic, you can use these Library-subscribed news databases.
Let's say the topic of your assignment is "hotel industry". You are interested to learn if there are any hotel industry studies related to COVID.
You can google the terms and collect some keywords directly from search results. You can also explore some news articles and Wikipedia entries to further develop your terminology. Here are some examples:
| From search results: | Keywords collected: | |
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| From a News article: | Expand the keyword list: | |
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| From a Wikipedia entry: | Expand the keyword list: | |
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You can use a mind map to jot down and structure the keywords you have collected. Simply draw on a piece of paper, or use an online tool such as Whimsical, Miro, MindMeister or XMind.
