Search & Find

• Once your topic has been approved, you can start gathering information from a variety of reference sources, such as books, encyclopedias, and journals. Additional background information may be found in your lecture notes and textbooks. Librarians will be happy to show you how to use the various research tools within the library and may suggest other sources of information

• Journals and magazines are important sources for up-to-date information in all disciplines. For research papers, you will be required to use scholarly sources. Therefore, it is very important to be able to distinguish scholarly writing from other types of writing. Click here to learn the differences between magazine articles and journal articles.

• The UA Library Catalog is always a good place to start. The catalog provides information on all the items that UA library owns, such as books, videos etc.

• WorldCat is one of the 300 paid databases of the UA Library. It brings together the holdings of hundreds or thousands of libraries around the world in a single searchable database. You may use this database to interlibrary loan materials that UA library does not own.

• Boolean Search Strategy Builder (Using words like "and" and "or" to define your search)

• Evaluating your sources is a crucial step of the research process. You need to carefully evaluate each source to determine its appropriateness and quality.

• It is especially important to evaluate information that you find on the Web. Because anyone can post anything on the web, you will have to determine whether the information on the web site is valuable. Go to Evaluating Web Information for specific criteria used to analyze web sites.

The UA Writing Center can also help you at any stage in your writing process. It is FREE and open to ALL UA Students in ANY class.

Step Six: Citing Sources

• Citing sources is an important part of your research. It gives proper credit to the authors of the materials you have used in writing your paper.
• Using someone else's ideas or phrases and representing their work as your own, either on purpose or through carelessness, is plagiarism (see UA's Code of Academic Integrity)
• To complete your paper, you need to follow specific citation formats.
  Examples of these are located in the Library's Citation Guides.