By Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D.
As you start to work on your research papers, you may find it to be rather confusing. Do you just Google everything on the Web? Will your results be adequate? Ideally, your research will involve a combination of free Web-based search and premium content. Further, if your college provides access to databases, encyclopedias, and dictionaries, which ones do you use? The options are dizzying, and many are not reliable. Here is a discussion of well-known databases and their content.
Free Web-Based Research Sources and Databases
All of the databases and research sources listed below have free search and some free content. Some may ask you to pay for premium access.
HighBeam is a premiere online library where you can find research, facts, and articles. We collect millions of articles from newspapers like The Washington Post and The Boston Globe, magazines like The Economist and Newsweek, and journals like JOPERD and Journal of Research in Childhood Education. We deliver all of this in a single research Web site. HighBeam also provides an in-depth online library of reference works. Research online dictionaries, including Webster's New World Dictionary and The Oxford American College Dictionary as well as encyclopedias from Britannica and Columbia.
This is a very useful and complete source for business, technology, and reference sources. Many articles are full-text, but each page is on a separate Web page, which makes it difficult to print out or save. You may purchase articles.
Encyclopedia, respected and thorough. Britannica.com includes a portion of the contents of the venerable print edition. You can also simultaneously search for reviews of the 125,000 hand-picked reference sites, related books and current articles from magazines such as Discover, The Economist and Newsweek.
MSN Encarta (Atlas, Encyclopedia, Dictionary, Quizzes, K-12, Adult Learning)
This free encyclopedia from Microsoft contains 17,000 articles and more than 2,200 photos, illustrations, maps, charts and tables. You can also access the World Atlas and the World English Dictionary, a "talking dictionary" replete with audio files.
Offers more than 50,000 articles from The Concise Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia (Third Edition). Encyclopedia.com offers 170,000 links, including cross-referenced articles and other sites. You can also access articles and images from the Electric Library for a fee.
Search and connect to the Web sites of the publications/Web sites of Time-Warner (Forbes, Time, Fortune, Sunset, People, EW, etc.).
This is popular, but use with caution. Do not cite Wikipedia in serious academic papers. Anyone can add to Wikipedia, and the information is often biased or incomplete — sometimes even inaccurate. As a result, it’s highly unreliable. Use Wikipedia as a starting point, but don’t trust it.
A search engine, but it also includes a number of dictionaries and encyclopedias. Its search engine is sufficiently different from Google's to yield unusual and refreshing results.
Art References:
Government Statistics
Statistics from more than 100 agencies.
The Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics (Forum) is a collection of 22 Federal government agencies involved in research and activities related to children and families. The Forum was founded in 1994 and formally established in April 1997 under Executive Order No. 13045. The mission of the Forum is to foster coordination and collaboration and to enhance and improve consistency in the collection and reporting of Federal data on children and families. The Forum also aims to improve the reporting and dissemination of information on the status of children and families.
Your School's Virtual Library
Funk and Wagnall's New World Library
Indexes over 25,000 records, covering an array of topics. Entries include various images and brief biographies. Full-text available.
Britannica Online (Library Edition)
Search for information in Encyclopedia Britannica and Britannica Concise Encyclopedia as well as a multimedia database. Full-text available.
Europa World Plus
Access the online version of the Europa World Year Book and the Regional Surveys of the World series. Includes political and economic information for hundreds of countries and territories. Full-text available.
Gale Virtual Reference Library
Access encyclopedias, almanacs, and specialized reference sources for multidisciplinary research. Search multiple resources at one time. The reference library includes titles such as Contemporary Authors, Dictionary of American History, Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia, Something About the Author, and many others. Full-text available.
Grove Dictionary of Art Online
Over 45,000 articles on every aspect of the visual arts from prehistory to the present. Full-text available.
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
Comprehensive dictionary of musical scholarship and includes links to musical Web sites around the world. Full-text available.
Hoover's Pro
Provides company and industry information for US and international companies, both public and private, from small to large. Materials indexed include data from Hoover's, Dun & Bradstreet, Mergent and Wegener. Full-text available.
LexisNexis Primary Sources in U.S. History
Access to historical research through the electronic publication of a wide range of primary sources and essential reference information. This suite of Web services provides new opportunities to carry out comprehensive research more easily then ever.
LexisNexis Academic: Newspapers/Current Periodicals
Access to full-text documents from over 6,000 news, business, and legal publications, using a variety of flexible search options.
Political Handbook of the World
Contains country profiles covering natural history, government, political parties, as well as profiles on intergovernmental organizations, development banks, and the agencies and specialized bodies of the United Nations. Full-text available.
ProQuest Criminal Justice Periodicals Index™
ProQuest Criminal Justice Periodicals Index™ is a comprehensive database of U.S. and international criminal justice journals. The database provides research support for students interested in careers in criminal justice, law enforcement, corrections administration, drug enforcement, rehabilitation, family law, and industrial security.
ProQuest Literature Online
Students can find explanations, definitions, and contextual material through a cross-searchable reference shelf that incorporates key academic textbooks such as The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms and The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Further bibliographic, biographical, and secondary information sources provide lists of works, author information, and narrative biographies.
ProQuest Nursing & Allied Health Source™
ProQuest Nursing & Allied Health Source provides users with reliable health care information covering nursing, allied health, alternative and complementary medicine, and much more.
Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
Provides full-text access to the Oxford English Dictionary online (for a fee). Includes definitions, etymologies, and quotations.
Smithsonian Physical Tables
The ninth revised edition of the Smithsonian Physical Tables is comprised of 901 tables concentrating on a broad scope of common physical and chemical data. The information provided is of general interest to scientists and engineers, and of particular interest to those involved with physics in its larger sense. Full-text available.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Provides access to encyclopedia articles on issues related to the field of philosophy. Full-text available.
World Almanac
Encyclopedia covering American culture, politics, technology, economics, environment and other topics. Entries include facts, statistics, and biographies. Sources include The World Almanac and Book of Facts, The World Almanac of the USA, The World Almanac of US Politics, The World Almanac for Kids, and The World Almanac Knowledge Source. Full-text available.
Related pages:
Virtual Libraries - Information about digital libraries and related resources
Reference Tools - Online dictionaries, thesauri, encyclopedias and more