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.
Contains the texts of more than 250 reference titles published by Oxford University Press from all subject areas.
Your project requires scholarly resources - articles, books, or book chapters written by an expert in the field (usually a professor with a PhD). These sources can be found in Wofford OneSearch.
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 best limiters in the left column of your search results.
A good beginning search for literary study is the name of the author and the book or poem with quotation marks surrounding each name.
Our initial search for "Toni Morrison" and "The Bluest Eye" found 275 results, including books and articles.
One way to narrow down our results is to limit to only scholarly or peer reviewed journal articles.
Now we have 94 results instead of nearly 300, and we know that these sources were written by scholars and published after being peer-reviewed.
To access an article, click on its title, then scroll down to the "View Online" section to find the link to the full text of the article.
You can either download the article or save it to your OneSearch account by using the pushpin icon next to the article title in the results list.
To narrow your results further, try adding an additional keyword that touches on the novel's theme or plot to the search box at the top of the page.
