Find Information at Bowman
Searching the catalog doesn't find everything we have! Check out the tabs below to search for more specific types of information.
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.
Find books by using Subject terms from the catalog - Here are examples related to Clean Energy, Gender & Identity, Reproductive Rights, and Sustainability :
| Clean Energy | Sustainability |
| Gender identity | Sustainable agriculture |
| Renewable energy sources | Sustainable development |
| Reproductive Rights | Women's rights |
| Sex role | |
| Solar energy |
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. Search for articles exploring the ways businesses are involved the areas of sustainability and renewable energy. - 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 about your chosen topic. Remember there are ways to search online that can 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 leave a space, and then enter your topic keywords, and hit enter. All of the results will be from the New York Times. You can replace the NY Times URL with different URL, or with a domain, such as edu or gov to retrieve results from websites that end in those domains.
- 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 windowUse your Menlo email & password in one of the links below to create & activate your free subscription to the NY Times. The Menlo Community has full-text access from 1851 to present. [There is a limit of 5 articles a day per user for articles from the period 1923-1980.]
- SustainabilityThis page is part of the U.S. Government's Environmental Protection Agency website. Find out about current research and information in the area of sustainability.
