Religion Junior Seminar - Library Research

Spring 2009: Religion and Empire

Library Sessions

24 February 2009: Advanced Techniques and Finding Primary Sources

Citation Searching

We talked last session about using the articles cited in the literature as a means of both locating additional quality sources and understanding the scholarly community engaged in research on your topic. Many of you were familiar with this method of looking backward in the literature. Citation searching allows you to look forward in the literature and see who cited a particular article.

We'll look in class at the mechanics of doing citation searching using Web of Science. Just keep in mind when you search that the citations appear in Web of Science exactly as the author cited them. You really get a good sense of how often there are mispellings and other errors in authors' citations.

Finding Primary Sources

Finding primary sources can be one of the most difficult and most rewarding parts of library research. You really get to be a detective when you're tracking down primary sources related to your topic. By their very nature these sources are curious, quirky things. I have prepared a page about Finding Primary Sources to help guide you through the process.

Citation Management

Members of the Reed community can use EndNote to help manage their citations. You may want to check into this tool, either now or for your thesis.