Reference articles (see video above if you haven't yet!) help you become more familiar with the important questions, events, and people within your topic and the vocabulary used by experts that can help you with later searches. These are often a good places to start your research.
Here are two different ways to find reference articles.
1. Using a reference article-only database
You can use a database like Gale Virtual Reference Library to find background articles in academic encyclopedias, usually written by professors to provide an overview of a topic.
OR
2. Using OneSearch to find reference articles
In OneSearch, to limit your results to reference articles, use the "resource type" filter on the left and select "Reference Resources".
PLEASE NOTE: this list is arranged A-Z. If you don't see the words "Reference Resources" you need to click on "show more" to see the whole list.
After you filter for reference sources, your list will look more like this, with all results being reference resources.
Each result will give you the name of the article or chapter, the name of the publication it is from, the date, and other key information. Most are online articles.
When you click on "available online", you will be presented with options for reading:
(Having more than one link here just means that we have the same resource in more than one database.)