Sourcepack

Librarian: Anne Barker 

Some research tricks

• Clarify your questions and the types of information you need to answer them.
• Think about where types of information are typically published.
• Use a variety of words: movies, cinema, film, motion pictures.
• Use truncation to find word variants: techn* = technical, technology, technological, technocrat, etc.
• Use both broad and narrow terms: media, cinema, film, etc.
• Put OR between words to search for more.
• Put AND between words to narrow your results.
• Search by film title AND another term (director, actor, date) for more precision.
• Search for information about people, putting surname first, e.g. Mcluhan, Marshall.

Finding Articles

Use these databases to identify articles on your topic:

• Academic Search Premier
• Lexis Nexis Academic (Choose News, then Book, movie....reviews.)
• PsycINFO
• Sociological Abstracts
• Alternative Press Index
• Communication Abstracts
• Communication and Mass Media Complete
• MLA International Bibliography
• FIAF:International Index to Film/TV Periodicals

Click on to locate a copy of the article online, in the library, or through ILL@MU.

Finding Books

• The MERLIN catalog shows materials in the MU Libraries.
• The MOBIUS catalog shows materials from Missouri academic libraries.
• WorldCat shows materials from many libraries worldwide.

Other Resources

• The Gale Virtual Reference Library provides specialized online encyclopedias for background information.
• Google options facilitates specific web searching of blogs, videos, images, scholarly information, etc.

Evaluating Resources

• Critical evaluation of resources (University of California, Berkeley)
• Evaluating information found on the Internet (Johns Hopkins University)