LibGuides: HCOM 475: Home

Choosing Keywords

Keyword brainstorming activity
In this activity, you'll practice brainstorming keywords for your working research topic, and discuss your ideas with a partner.

Gale Virtual Reference Library This link opens in a new window
Another strategy for developing a list of keywords related to your topic is to do some background reading. Google searches sometimes work for this, but you can also consult our collection of subject-specific online encyclopedias, which offer introductions and general articles on research topics, written from various disciplinary perspectives.

Choosing Databases

The library recommends the following databases for researching topics in the humanities:

America: History & Life
U.S. and Canadian History.
Communication Source
Covers top research journals in communication studies and related disciplines including media studies, linguistics, speech pathology, rhetoric and discourse.
Ethnic NewsWatch This link opens in a new window
Newspapers, magazines, and journals of the ethnic and minority press.
GenderWatch This link opens in a new window
Historical and contemporary perspectives on gender roles, sexuality, feminism, masculinity, etc.
JSTOR
Scholarly journal articles at least one to five years old on a wide variety of academic topics.
Latino Literature
Includes fiction, poetry and plays representing Chicano culture and the various ethnicities of Latin American writers working in the United States.
Literature (Gale)
Provides access to biographies, bibliographies and critical analysis of authors from a variety of ages and literary disciplines.
MLA International Bibliography
Comprehensive index to worldwide literature
Project Muse This link opens in a new window
Search for books and journals in the humanities and social sciences from over 200 of the world’s most distinguished university presses and scholarly societies
Religion & Philosophy This link opens in a new window
A selection of more than 250 magazines and academic journals covering religion, philosophy and the related areas of archaeology and anthropology

OneSearch
As an alternative to searching specific databases, you can use OneSearch on the library homepage to search all the library's collections simultaneously. When searching OneSearch, it is important to be specific with your search terms, because you are searching a very large number of information items.

Current CSUMB Students, Staff, and Faculty are welcome to check out Course Reserve items. For more information, click here.

Interlibrary Loan or Resource Sharing
When the library doesn't own the full text of an information item, you can request the item through Resource Sharing (a service integrated into OneSearch).

Evaluating Potential Sources

Let's take a close look at the record and full text of an article from a humanities journal, and discuss some questions you might ask when evaluating the article's relevance to your project, including:

What are the author's research questions?
What lenses and/or theoretical concepts does the author engage?
What conclusions does the author reach?
What further questions are raised in the course of addressing the initial research questions?

Vaughn, R. (2018). The Politics of Clean: Representing Food Salvage and Dumpster Diners. American Studies (Lawrence), 57(1), 29–56. https://doi.org/10.1353/ams.2018.0024

When you find information outside the context of the library, for example, from a Google search, what strategies do you use to decide if the information is reliable?

Citing Sources

Please be careful with automatic citation formatters! They can be useful for creating a rough draft of a citation, but they very often make mistakes. To check that an automatically-generated citation is correctly formatted, you can consult the library's citation guides.

The APA citation for the Vaughn 2018 article we looked at earlier was automatically formatted using the citation tool in OneSearch. Can you find any mistakes?

Getting Help

Please use the contact info in the upper left of this guide to reach out for help any time you need it. I will look forward to continuing to work with you, and I wish you all the best for an engaging and successful research endeavor!

HCOM 475

Librarian

Ask A Librarian

Choosing Keywords

Choosing Databases

Evaluating Potential Sources

Citing Sources

Getting Help