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Section Menu
-
- English
- Geography and Environmental Studies
- Interdisciplinary Studies
- Journalism, Communication, and New Media
- Modern Languages
- Minor in Language and Global Studies
- World Languages and Cultures Certificate
- Associate of Arts (Modern Languages) Degree
- Modern Languages Certificate
- Courses
- Field Schools
- Student Success
- Language Lab
- Special Projects and Courses
- Faculty
- Financial Assistance
- Advising
- Our Vision
- Our History
- Contact us
- Philosophy, History and Politics
- Philosophy
- History
- Degree Options
- Careers in History
- History Courses
- Student Success
- Awards and Scholarships
- Handbook for History Students
- Introduction - Handbook
- Why Study History?
- Varieties of History
- Historian's Work
- Pros, Amateurs and others
- Careers
- Libraries and Research
- Taking Notes
- Formulating a Topic
- Compiling a Bibliography
- Primary Sources
- Secondary Sources
- Need for Recent Sources
- Where to Start
- Note-taking
- Shape of the Essay
- Style of the Essay
- Checking the Essay
- Documentation
- Bibliographies and Footnotes
- Plagiarism
- Writing Essay Examinations
- Title Pages and Formatting
- Citation Generators
- Examples
- Citation Formatting
- History Links
- History Faculty
- Political Studies
- Our Faculty
- Contact Us
- Psychology
- Sociology and Anthropology
- Theatre Arts
- Visual Arts
Where to Start
You may be tempted to try searching an online as the first step in researching an essay topic; unfortunately this approach works much better for answering a simple query on then it does for finding resources for a research project. When you start a keyword or subject search, you will get an undifferentiated mass of sources, a very small percentage of which will be pertinent to your topic, and there is no guarantee these resources will be scholarly.
Your first searching should be done in paper sources, which is actually a lot less work in the long run. Here is a list of places to look for material, in roughly the order you should search:
Bibliographies in recent textbooks in the field
Authors of history textbooks usually are professional historians. When compiling lists of "Suggested Readings" at the ends of chapters, they include books that they believe to be most important on particular topics, so this should help your narrow you search.
Bibliographies in recent monographs
This will allow you to start finding more recently published works on your general topic.
Review articles and historiographical portions of articles in scholarly journals/periodicals
TRU library has access to an extensive list of periodicals. To find out which database has which periodical, try using the “periodical search” function on the libraries homepage. You can always print off any article which have found online.
Bibliographies published in book form
Some research topics are so large that there are separate published bibliographies on them. You may find some of these in the reference section of the TRU Library, but some may be in the stacks. To check this out, do a keyword search on your topic and include the word "bibliography".
You can always ask the library staff to assist you with any research questions you might have.