Scholarly reference works are useful for finding background information on a topic. Finding background information can help you locate keywords for searching databases and identify more specific areas of your topic that you may want to research further.
Internet search engines like Google can search billions of public web pages for your keywords in seconds, but they cannot access proprietary data. The library pays for access to databases containing scholarly resources that cannot all be found using internet search engines. Don’t miss these valuable resources!
Internet research provides quick results but verifying that information can be time consuming. While the library sources have been preselected and evaluated by experts for quality and usefulness, with Internet research, you have to figure out by yourself what is useful and what is not.
Search in Google for a random term, and you are likely to come up with an average of a few thousand pages of which you can view up to a thousand. Most people do not look beyond the first and ten (sponsered and page-ranked) hits and therefore miss relevant sources.
So, you now know that using Internet sources involves a certain risk. That does not mean that they cannot be useful for your research. Why pick and choose if you can use both?
Provides cross-searchable access to over three million entries from 273 titles and 57 publishers. Features full-text content from hundreds of reference books covering every major subject.
This growing subscription package includes over 160,000 scholarly titles across academic disciplines.
Search and view the full text of over 200,000 eBooks. Also includes titles from the eBook Academic Collection.
This database provides over 25,000 encyclopedic entries covering a variety of subject areas.
A database of encyclopedias and specialized reference sources for multidisciplinary research. These reference materials once were accessible only in the library, but now you can access them online from the library or remotely 24/7.
Online access to several different reference titles within the following Salem Press collections: Salem Literature, Salem History, Salem Science, Salem Health and Salem Careers.