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:
The history of Western medicine spans three thousand years and can be approached in many different ways. Use these resources to survey the field, pick a topic, or collect useful background information.
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).
