Reference articles will be a good place to get started for background information--they 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.
For this assignment, you cannot count them as a final source, but they can be a great help to get you started with your research.
(See this video if you'd like to learn more about what a reference article is and how it can help you).
To find reference articles in OneSearch, use the "resource type" filter on the left and select "Reference Resources".
PLEASE NOTE: if you don't see the words "Reference Resources" under Resource Type, you need to click on "show more" to see the whole list.
After you filter for reference sources, the results left will be reference resources.
Each result will show you the name of the article or chapter, the name of the publication it is from, the date, and other key information.
When you click on "available online", you will be presented with options for reading:
These links go to the databases where we have the article. You can click on ANY of these links to get to your article.
Hostos Library provides online access to many newspapers.
You can search
for news articles in OneSearch by searching and then going to the "Resource Type" filters on the side and clicking on "Newspaper Articles".
If you don't see Newspaper Articles listed, click on "Show More" in order to see the full list.
Please make sure you click on Newspaper Articles and not something that looks similar!
Optional: you can enter the dates you want in the date filter on the side.
Optional: choose specific newspapers to include or exclude: if you hover over the name of a newspaper, you will see an open box on the left and a red box on the right of each newspaper title.
If you check the open boxes on the left side, that tells OneSearch to ONLY INCLUDE results from those titles.
If you check the red boxes with a line through them on the right side, that tells OneSearch to EXCLUDE results from those titles.
One of our databases is called Ethnic Newswatch, and it's a great source for articles from newspapers that are or were published in communities of color and immigrant communities.
Peer-reviewed journals (sometimes called scholarly, academic, or refereed) have gone through a review process by experts in the field before being published. Peer-reviewed articles are highly specialized reports, usually about original research, written by experts for an audience of experts.
If you already have a lot of knowledge about your research topic, a peer-reviewed article can help you understand the details of debated ideas, theories, methods, and discoveries within a specialized field.
If you are new to your subject, you will need to first build your background knowledge in order to read a peer-reviewed journal well enough to understand it thoroughly.
Note! Some things you find within peer-reviewed journals are not peer-reviewed articles. Examples includes editorials, letters to the editor, news items, and book reviews, which do not go through the same review process.
