A LIST OF VALUABLE SOURCES

(from Silverman, Hughes, & Wienbroer.  Rules of Thumb: A Guide for Writers and Shortcuts for the Student Writer, both from McGraw-Hill, 2005)

Help With:

Last update: 12/12/07

The sources given here may be listed in a menu of choices on your library's home page, or they may be installed in designated computers, or you may be able to access them directly on the Web. If you do not find an electronic version, ask the librarian for the print or film version.

Note: We have given complete URLs for web addresses. To get a short version of a long address, enter it at http://www.snipurl.com/

INDEXES AND DATABASES

Academic Search Premier

American National Biography

AP Photo Archive

Biblioline with Libros en Venta

ERIC (educational resources) http://www.eric.ed.gov/

Facts on File History Database Center

FirstSearch

Health Reference Center Academic

Humanities Citation Index

Humanities Index

InfoTrac

Lexis-Nexis

Medline http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/

MLA(Modern Language Association)

International Bibliography

National Newspaper Index

Psychology and Behavior Sciences Collection

Readers' Guide Full Text

Science Citation Index

Science Index

Social Science Citation Index

Social Science Index

Westlaw

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REFERENCE PAGES

Internet Public Library http://www.ipl.org/

Librarians' Index to the Internet http://lii.org/

Library of Congress Research Tools http://lcweb.loc.gov/rr/tools.html

Literary Resources on the Web http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Lit/

RefDesk (Virtual Reference Desk) http://www.refdesk.com/

World Lecture Hall (links to faculty Websites at colleges all over the world, organized by discipline) http://www.utexas.edu/world/lecture/

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SEARCH ENGINES AND SUBJECT DIRECTORIES

Search engines find articles on the Web; they rarely find chapters in books or articles in journals or newspapers, so for most research topics you will need to use the databases your library provides.

About.com (each area is maintained by an expert to whom you can e-mail) http://www.about.com/

AltaVista (one of the most comprehensive, allows for advanced searches for terms near one another) http://altavista.com/

Dogpile (fun to use, simultaneously searches several search engines, including Google) http://www.dogpile.com

Google (huge database, retrieves at a high relevance) http://www.google.com/

Google Scholar (offers access to a wide variety of articles in scholarly journals, using Google's powerful search techniques) http://scholar.google.com/

Highway 61 (simultaneously searches the twelve most popular search engines, arranging results by relevance) http://www.highway61.com/

Hotbot (allows for specifying words that appear only in the title, body, or links; can search in 35 languages) http://www.hotbot.com/

Yahoo (very fast subject search http://www.yahoo.com/ of a huge database)

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ELECTRONIC TEXTS

Bartleby: Great Books Online http://www.bartleby.com/

E-Server at Iowa State University http://eserver.org/

Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/

E-text http://www.etext.org/index.shtml

Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.net/

Online Books Page at the University of Pennsylvania http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/

Questia: Online Library of Books and Journals http://www.questia.com/Index.jsp

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NEWS SOURCES ONLINE

Note that most news organizations and publications maintain a website with at least some material from their current issues or programs. Sources listed here allow free searches through their archives, although there may be a fee for the article itself.

Chronicle of Higher Education Arts and Letters Daily with updated reviews and links to news sources http://www.ALdaily.com/

National Public Radio http://www.npr.org/

Newslink (links to magazines http://newslink.org/ and newspapers)

New York Times http://www.nytimes.com 

Public Broadcasting System http://www.pbs.org/

US News Archives on the Web http://www.ibiblio.org/slanews/internet/archives.html

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STATISTICAL SOURCES

American Statistical Index http://www.fedstats.gov/

Bureau of Census Reports http://www.census.gov/

FedWorld http://www.fedworld.gov/

Statistical Resources on the Web http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/statsnew

World Fact Book http://www.bartleby.com/151

See also individual federal agencies' websites

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HELP WITH STYLE , GRAMMAR , AND USAGE

Ammer, Christine. American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms. Boston: Houghton, 1997. An explanation of the meaning of phrases and when to use which preposition in a phrase (especially helpful for ESL)

Burchfield, R.W., ed. The New Fowler's English Usage. 3rd ed. New Yor : Oxford, 2000. A thorough coverage on word usage.

Jack Lynch's Page: Grammar and Style Notes http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing

Merriam-Webster, eds. Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. 10th ed. Boston: Merriam-Webster, 1998. Also at http://www.m-w.com/

Foreign Word: Online Dictionaries and Free Translation Tools http://www.foreignword.com/

University of Maine's Links to other Writing Centers http://www.ume.maine.edu/~wcenter/others.html

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HELP WITH FORMAT FOR RESEARCH PAPERS

American Psychological Association. Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. 5th ed. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2001. Also see their website http://www.apastyle.org

Gibaldi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 6th ed. New York: Modern Language Association, 2003. Also see their website http://www.mla.org/style_fa

University of Chicago Press. The Chicago Manual of Style. 15th ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. Also see their website http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html