Tips:

Spelling counts! A foreign title or name, particularly from a culture that does not use the Roman alphabet, may have a couple of different alternate spellings. Make use of truncation and wildcards. If you know (or want to guess at) a couple of spellings, connect them with an 'or' Boolean operator.

Make sure you read the notes and bibliographies of the articles and books that you find. Our databases and indexes are limited temporally and in the number of periodicals they cover. The bibliographies and notes in books, reference sources and journal articles will include sources outside the scope of our resources and, by seeing the same articles and authors mentioned again and again, will point you toward the important work in a field (something our indexes and databases do not indicate).

When you’ve found a subject heading in our catalog, or in ConnectNY that seems well-suited to your research, note it. You can use it in other databases like WorldCat, ProjectMUSEor The History E-Book Project.

Don’t forget to talk to your professor and to ask a librarian if you need help finding sources (or even if you just want to make sure you’ve covered all your bases).

Warnings:

Read everything critically, but especially scholarship that comes from unvetted sources, specifically Web sites. Scholarly publications like those found in JSTOR, and ProjectMUSE or in the History indexes listed on our websites publish articles that have been reviewed by experts. Anyone can put anything on a web site.

Wikipedia can be a great resource, but double check the information you get from it, and don’t include it in your bibliography. It’s not the definitive kind of resource that, say The Encyclopedia Britannica is.