ANTH 240 Peoples of the World

Before we talk about how to find resources, let's look at what kind of resources you're looking for.

Books

Books are a great way to do research. Most scholarly books are heavily researched and you can get an in-depth account of a topic in one place. Many times  you can find books that cover all aspects of a topic from various lenses and perspectives.  In addition, the references and bibliographies can help you to find specific research on your topic.

Articles

When conducting research, scholars often rely on articles from scholarly journals rather than popular magazines. These are often referred to as scholarly or peer-reviewed resources.

Scholarly resources are written by scholars in a particular subject area for other scholars in that subject area (that includes you!). These articles go through what's called a "peer-review" process where other scholars read and examine the articles for quality of research before they are published. For the most part, you can rely on scholarly resources to be credible and reliable sources for your research.

The chart below will help you identify the difference between scholarly and popular articles.

Websites

Websites can be also be a good place to find research. There are lots of areas where topics are being written about that aren't covered in traditional scholarly literature. Be wary of websites though. We will go in depth on how to spot a good source on a website from a bad one when we get to evaluating sources.

Reproduced from Duke University Libraries with permission under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-SA 3.0