HONR 200: Rhetoric

While the gold box on the library's homepage is a good place to find preliminary information on your research topic, subject-specific databases (collections of articles, like PubMed or PSYCInfo) will be more useful for your source analyses.

1. To access these databases, peruse the list of subjects on this page:

2. Next, identify the disciplines your research problem falls under. Think broadly; students researching these example topics would look at databases in the following disciplines:

• representation of black female background dancers in hip hop music videos:  diversity, gender, race, and ethnicity; sociology; arts, performing
• brain drain of German doctors to other countries:  history; sociology; medicine; nursing
• the effects of childhood autonomy over school and leisure time:  education; medicine; public health; psychology

3. Click a topic and then choose a sub-topic (as pictured below):

4. This will take you to a research guide listing the best databases and other resources on your topic, as well as listing the librarian who specializes in that research discipline. Use expert terms, truncation, and Boolean operators to search these databases. Need a refresher on how to do that? Check out the Search Strategies videos (see tabs at the left).

For most medical topics, you will probably want to start with PubMed, the primary biomedical and health sciences database. Searching in PubMed can be tricky; it works very differently than other library databases.