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FYS 154: A Literary Journey Into Cultural Divides (Brickner): Books, Ebooks and Reference Books

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Finding Books and Media in the UWSP Library

  1. Develop your topic sentence.  For example: I am interested in what factors impact teenage pregnancy rates in the United States.
  2. Develop a search strategy using search terms based on topic sentence.

Keyword search terms:  teenage pregnancy United States

or

Subject Heading search terms:  Teenage Pregnancy--United States

  1. Limit your results list
  2. Sort your results list
  3. Evaluating items in the list
  4. Find your item in the UWSP Library

 

Other searching strategies: 

  1. Use synonyms.  For example:  adolescent pregancy or teenage mothers.
  2. Use quotations to search for specific phrases.  For example: "teenage pregnancy" or "United States".
  3. Use the truncation symbol (?) to expand your results. A truncation symbol will cause the search algorithim to look for the root word and for variations in the spelling in the ending of a word after the ?. For example, using pregnan? will return results with pregnant, pregnancy, and pregnancies.

Note:  Other search interfaces use * as a truncation symbol.

Finding Books and Media at Other UW Campuses

 

For example, following the same search topic and strategy for teenage pregnancy in the United States as above in the UWSP Library Catalog.

  1. Enter your search terms
  2. Limit your results list
  3. Sort your results list
  4. Evaluating items in the list
  5. Request your item from another UW Library through Universal Borrowing (UB)

Finding Books and Media From Libraries Worldwide

 

For example, following the same search topic and strategy for teenage pregnancy in the United States as above in the UWSP Library Catalog.

  1. Enter your search terms
  2. Limit your results list
  3. Sort your results list
  4. Evaluating items in the list
  5. Request your item from another lending library through Interlibrary Loan (ILL)

Search Reference Universe


Enter your search terms:

Search the reference books in the Reference Room of the UWSP library.

What is a Scholarly Source?

Scholarly sources generally:

  • are written by qualified scholars for other scholars with authors names and credentials included,
  • contain language which is geared toward those with knowledge of a specific discipline,
  • are published by an academic institution, scholarly, or professional organization,
  • are comprised of detailed, advanced, sophisticated information about a topic,
  • are based on extensive research and content is current,
  • are not translated or interpreted by a non-expert,
  • are peer reviewed – an article is reviewed by two or more subject area experts who check its facts, methodology and reasoning as well as the quality of its writing. Scholarly books (also called monographs) are reviewed by editors who are often subject experts, and
  • include extensive list of references.

What are Primary and Secondary Sources of Information?

Primary Sources

These are original sources of information on which other research is based, including documents such as poems, diaries, court records, interviews, surveys, and fieldwork. Primary materials also include research results generated by experiments, which are published as journal articles in some fields of study, or as sets of data such as census statistics which have been tabulated but not interpreted.

Secondary Sources

These sources describe or analyze the primary source. Examples of secondary sources include dictionaries, encyclopedias, textbooks, and books and articles that interpret or review research works.

MLA Citation Style Handbook

Citation Guides