History Department Research Guide  Tags: history reference databases primary_sources  

The online edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica () is a fully searchable and browsable collection of over 73,000 authoritative reference articles. Several bonus features are included in this reference tool: Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary and Thesaurus; thousands of photographs, illustrations, and sound files; hundreds of relevant videos; hot links from Encyclopedia Britannica articles to related magazine and journal articles from EBSCO and ProQuest online databases; World Data containing information and customizable charts and tables about nations of the world; Notable Quotations from historical and contemporary important men and women; and Gateway to the Classics, hundreds of works by significant writers of the Western world.

Britannica Online has carefully edited articles on all major topics. It fits the ideal purpose of a reference source as a place to get started -- or to refer back to as you read and write: articles written by easy-to-identify (or signed), credible authors that provide the academic community's most accepted facts and opinions about a topic. Most articles provide links or references to additional research.

You can generally cite these articles without your professor frowning on them as sources. Ask first: some faculty don't want you to cite from any encyclopedia. Why not? As a class or type of media encyclopedias are best suited to providing background information rather than in-depth or up-to-date scholarly analysis.

Wikipedia is "written collaboratively by volunteers from all around the world" and relies on the collective wisdom of its volunteers to get the facts right and to balance the opinions expressed in the articles. It can be very useful as a starting point for many topics, especially obscure ones with special or passing popular interest.

Some Manhattanville faculty instruct their students not to use Wikipedia as a source because of the volunteer approach to editing, which can be unreliable at times. So, to be safe, think of Wikipedia more as a place to get started, but move on from Wikipedia to works with an identifiable author from a traditionally edited encyclopedia or other published reference work. An interesting compromise between traditional encyclopedias and Wikis is Citizendium.

This box courtesy of: Rick Lezenby

Find reliable information about thousands of historical actors in the three databases and one Temple libguide listed below.

Question: What value lies in a reference work? Why, for example, would a researcher bother to consult a scholarly encyclopedia?

Answer: Reference books (or tertiary sources) help researchers contextualize their topics and in turn begin to ask the right questions. Reference books set the stage for more efficient database searching; researchers cannot elicit relevant search results if they don't know which keywords (or search terms) to use. Articles in scholarly encyclopedias often contain bibliographies that lead researchers to the most respected/useful secondary and primary works on a topic. In short, reference books are a great way to begin your research.

Many standard reference books are now available in digital form. Search the terms "electronic reference sources" history in CastleCat. 

Online version of the largest reference work published in the social and behavioral sciences. The history subject classification contains articles about epochs and periods; groups and social formations; historical thought and historiography; problems in history; revolutions, movements, and protests; structures, processes, and institutions; subfields, areas, and specializations; and theory, methods, and approaches.

A database of up-to-date encyclopedias and dictionaries, Gale Virtual Reference Library currently provides access to 20 history reference works, including:

netLibrary connects researchers with electronic versions of books from across all academic disciplines, including history. Approximately 3,400 public-domain titles constitute the core of the database. Recently published books still under copyright make up the majority of titles. From the latter category the Libraries have licensed approximately 12,800 eBooks for the Temple community, including 40 dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other American and world history reference books in the netLibrary Reference Center.

Click History link under Subject Reference in Oxford Reference Online for access to 44 history reference works, including:

Manage your citations with RefWorks, a tool that allows researchers to easily import, export, search, and create automatically formatted bibliographies online. Citations found via searches in library databases such as JSTOR can be imported directly into RefWorks. No manual typing required. Bibliographies generated within RefWorks can then be exported into Word using any of dozens of citation formats (MLA, APA, Chicago, Turabian, etc.).