Academic Encyclopedias are a good place to find TOPIC INTRODUCTIONS & OVERVIEWS, KEY CONCEPTS & TERMINOLOGY, ideas on how to FOCUS a broad topic, and LEADS to addtional sources.
For reference sources, try general search terms. As always, experiment to see what works best! And keep in mind, that different articles will take different approaches to the issue and cover different aspects of it. For example, the topic of anxiety may be approached from medical perspectives, family, psychology, race, gender, socioeconomics, education, and more.
Read/ listen to/ Watch news media for reporting, analysis, and commentary on current issues.
Where needed use limiters for magazines and newspapers to find journalism, and be sure to limit to current enough sources.
Find great info on a range of topics in Holman Library's book and educational video collections.
Use the One Search Catalog to search for both. You can also search directly in our streaming video collection Films on Demand or in our ebook collections. Note that you can read and cite just a chapter, rather than an entire book.
Use KEYWORDS or SUBJECT TERMS that capture what you want to learn about.
For example, if I'm interested in the impact of trauma on learning or the relationship between the two, I can search for trauma AND learning.
My search of trauma and learning returned over 500 books, book chapters, and videos.
Scroll through the results list. Look at titles. What looks relevant?
To learn more about a title, click on it and read the "record" with a description, table of contents, and subject headings.
The images below show my search results and the record for the book Building Trauma-Sensitive Schools.
Results:
Book Record:
Limit to peer-reviewed or scholarly journal articles to find scholarly articles. By the way, be sure to still assess if it's a scholarly article. (For example, scholarly journals contain book reviews of scholarly texts. These are not scholarly articles.)
To find the most relevant articles, you will need to consider many more. Try multiple keywords and search different databases.
College Students AND mental health
Different information sources teach you different things. Consider:
Reference: for an introduction & for information from different academic perspectives
News media: for current news reporting & analysis of current issues
Books & videos: for a range of approaches to the subject, including case studies, memoir, journalism, and research
The Web: for some information sources not in library databases or on library shelves, including government websites, organizations, some news sources, and more
Opinion: for a range of arguments on your topics, many from those with lived experience or working in the field
Scholarship: for research and theoretical analysis
