Research Help: Reference Sources

Spending a few minutes learning about your topic can save you tons of time when you do research!

Reference sources are a starting place that can provide background information, dates, and key facts. These materials can help you formulate a better search strategy with relevant keywords that best describe your topic. An informed search strategy will make searching the library catalog for books and the research databases for articles much easier for you. Remember, faculty will generally want you to use a variety of different sources for academic research.

Reference sources generally include:

• Encyclopedias
• Handbooks
• Dictionaries and thesauri
• Almanacs
• Wikipedia (see below for more details)

Some reference tools, such as the Columbia Encyclopedia, cover many topics and are good for locating facts, dates, and background information. Some reference sources cover specific fields in more depth, such as the encyclopedia listed below.

Wikipedia results are often the first ones you see when researching in Google and other search engines. Wikipedia is "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" and is therefore not a very reliable source to use for academic research. That said, Wikipedia is a good starting point when you know little to nothing about a subject area, but it will not be one of your cited sources. Use Wikipedia for gathering search terms and ideas and take a look at the citations.

For college-level research, you'll want to search more authoritative sources that Holy Family subscribes to, such as EBSCO's Ebook Collection and Academic Search Ultimate.For college-level research, you'll want to search more authoritative sources that Holy Family subscribes to, such as EBSCO's Ebook Collection and Academic Search Ultimate.