Reference sources like encyclopedias provide short, factual articles about topics. You can use them at any point in the research process to help you understand things like historical events, sociological theory, or literary history. This background knowledge is important in helping you understand the critical and peer-reviewed sources you will read later.
As you read your background sources, take notes on potential keywords: how do scholars describe your topic? What are some important events or people who are related to your topic? You will use these keywords when you look for scholarly sources.
Finding articles that talk about a specific short story is sometimes tricky because scholars are more likely to write about full-length novels. These are the searches that I like to try in databases or OneSearch:
If you find too many sources, below are some searches that can help narrow your results:
If you can't find sources about your story, try searching for articles about the author more broadly and see if you can make connections between the themes discussed in the article and your research question.
Wofford OneSearch is a single search platform that contains books, ebooks, journal articles, magazines, newspapers, audio, video, and reference materials. It is a great place to explore your topic and find scholarly resources, but it can sometimes be overwhelming due to the amount of information a normal search will pull up. Think of it like shopping on Amazon: you should tell OneSearch exactly what you're looking for using keywords and choosing the right limiters in the left column of your search results.
For example, a search for deaf culture retrieves nearly 3500 results. You can narrow your search by adding additional keywords or using the limiters in the left column.
Choosing only scholarly and peer reviewed articles and limiting our results to articles published in the last 5 years reduces the number of articles to about 800.
Finally, we can add additional keywords to make our search more specific. Adding the keyword "United States" to our search brings up scholarly articles published in the last five years about Deaf culture in the US. Play around with your keywords and limiters until you find articles or books that will work for your project.
When you find resources that you'd like to save, click on the pushpin icon next to the item. Log in using your MyWofford credentials to save the items to your OneSearch account.
