Your Turn - 9:40am Section
These Google docs are available to everyone for trying out skills and strategies:
The final part of our session today will allow everyone a chance to practice, and begin to gather needed materials.
- Please search for useful articles and information on your topic and fill out this form.
Political Party Platforms - 2020
Best Resources for this Course
Finding Background Information in Library Databases
Use the resources on this page to investigate background information for your topic, to locate statistical information, and identify sources that will be helpful as you develop your paper or project.
- CQ Researcher This link opens in a new window
Provides original, comprehensive reporting and analysis on current events, including summaries and bibliographies. Controversial topics are addressed in a balanced, unbiased manner in the Congressional Quarterly tradition.
- Credo Reference This link opens in a new window
Provides full-text reference books in 20 subject areas. It includes over 180 titles and 65,000 images "powered by a network of cross-references that cut across topics, titles and publishers to provide answers - and new connections - in context." coverage: Varies
- Statista This link opens in a new window
One of the world's largest statistics portals with data from over 18,000 sources. Provides access to 1 million statistics. Also contains information on industries, countries, digital markets, and other topics, as well as infographics.
Finding Books and Ebooks
Bowman Library has a large variety of books and ebooks that are chosen for their relevance to the courses offered. You can access ebooks directly from the library website whether your off or on campus. Books and ebooks are good for finding overviews and history of your topic. You don't need to read the whole book to get the information you need for your project; often one chapter of a scholarly book will cover the information you need.
Try these subject headings related to politics & political parties in the United States in the Library Catalog:
| Press and politics | ||
| Conservatism in the press | ||
| Mass media Political aspects | Right and left (Political science) |
Finding Journal Articles
Often your professor will ask you to use scholarly articles, academic articles, or peer-reviewed articles. These are generally all the same thing. They are written by scholars who are experts in their fields and are usually tied to a college or university. They are great for:
- Credible and trustworthy information
- Recent findings and research topics in the field
- Research studies, tables, and data
- Bibliographies and reference lists.
Find Journal Articles about your topic:
- Academic Search Premier (via EBSCOhost) This link opens in a new window
Provides searching of over 8,500 journals, including peer-reviewed, across a wide range of topics. coverage: 1975 to present - Business Source Complete (via EBSCOhost) This link opens in a new window
Leading scholarly business database with over 1,300 publications, including peer-reviewed journals. Covers all business disciplines, including marketing, management, accounting, finance, and economics. Also includes financial data, company profiles, industry reports, market research reports, SWOT analyses, and more.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window
A full-text collection of more than 400 journals in business and the liberal arts, with especially strong coverage of business, finance, economics, history, regional studies, education, and sociology. (Our subscription includes the Arts & Sciences I, Arts & Sciences IV, Business I, and Business II collections.) JSTOR is notable for the high quality of the journals it includes. The most recent three to five years of each journal are usually excluded from JSTOR, however.
- Literature Resource Center This link opens in a new window
Provides full text criticisms, biographies, bibliographies, and work overviews. "Find up-to-date biographical information, overviews, full-text literary criticism and reviews on nearly 130,000 writers in all disciplines, from all time periods and from around the world, supplemented by the scholarly materials of the Scribner Writers Series and Twayne's World, U.S., and English Authors Series."
More Online Resources
Online newspapers, websites, and even Google Scholar, are all places to go for more information. Remember use the following strategies to help you target a particular type of source.
- For example, the best way to search for articles in the New York Times is to use a SITE search in Google.
- In the Google search bar type site:nytimes.com without any spaces;
- Next leave a space, and enter your keywords and search
- All of the results will be from the New York Times.
- You can also replace the NY Times URL with different URLs, OR with a domain, such as edu or gov to retrieve results from websites that are a part of these domains.
- Example: site:edu healthcare policy OR site:gov gun regulations
- GoogleTry using a site search in Google to find reviews or interviews related to your book, film or object. Type in Site: plus the URL of a publication, nytimes.com, or domain such as edu or gov, then add the title of the work or author plus 'review' or 'interview,' -- site:nytimes.com intuitionist review and scan through for relevant results.
- Google Scholar This link opens in a new windowProvides access to scholarly literature "across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations." Note that many articles contain only the citation and no full text; if full text is not available, you can order articles or books via Interlibrary Loan.
- New York Times (NYTimes.com) This link opens in a new windowActivate your subscription from one of the links below and make sure you use the off campus activation link if you are off campus and the on campus activation link if you are on campus. After creating your account, you can log on to the New York Times site directly using your Menlo e-mail and the password you have set up. iPhone, iPad, and Android apps are available with your login. The Menlo Community has full-text access to the New York Times from 1851 to the present. For the years 1923-1980 there is a limit of 5 articles per day per user.
More Websites - Supporting Information
Search these websites for more information on your topic:
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