Research Process / Overview of Resources
This summary provides a basic overview of how to go about researching a topic with comments on essential resources and tips to make the research portion of writing your paper less daunting. The tabs for each section contain more detail.
Background:
Epidemics/pandemics have occurred throughout history. Some have been named, others are defined by when the disease was active or particularly virulent: Plague of Justinian (Byzantine Empire, 5th c. BCE), Black Plague (14th c. Europe), AIDS (20th c.worldwide), search by named event, disease, or time period.
Reference resources will give definitions, overviews, and point you to other sources. A few will include full text secondary or contemporary primary sources.
Secondary sources (scholarly books, articles, documentaries, etc.)
--Catalogusmai or the Books, Media tab arerecommended for book searching. LImited requests for hardcopy from USM libraries, digital requests only from Interlibrary Loan (book chapters, documents, no full works).
--Historical Abstracts is the database for scholarly history articles and it links to our other databases and journal collections like JSTOR and Project Muse.
--Videos/documentaries can be searched for directly in the video databases.
Primary Sources (government reports, archival collections, contemporary articles/news, personal writings/memoirs, correspondence, etc.) See the Primary Sources guide for search techniques.
Primary sources come in a lot of different varieties, most of what you will likely use will be from published sources or easily accessible archives (in person or online).
