Last month, we highlighted the research starters in the Credo Reference collection. Continuing with this theme, our database of the month for December is Oxford Reference.
You may recognize Oxford University Press as the academic publisher that provides such resources as Oxford Art (formerly Grove Dictionary of Art), Oxford Music (formerly Grove Dictionary of Music) and the ever-popular OED as well as standalone researched works that thoroughly cover topics such as public mental health and union negotiations.
Like the Credo Reference books, these Oxford books offer solid foundations for beginning research projects or learning many facts about a general topic. This enable the researcher to develop a research question and discover key terms, people, places, etc. that may be used in scholarly article searches on JSTOR, EBSCOhost or your chosen academic article database.
For example, if you were taking a comparative religions class and wanted to find out about Islam for a paper, you could search Oxford Reference for this term.
The first item in the results list is a brief overview of the religion with links to some basic encyclopedia articles. Below that are more specific, nuanced resources, focusing on particular religious sects or art in religion, etc. Note also that the filters on the left side of the screen can help to narrow the search and hone the results list. The default availability of free and unlocked ensures that all the reference articles in the list are available in full text format. You can even limit your searches to books that contain illustrations!
Articles may be printed as pdf documents and include citations that may be used in Reference lists or on Worls Cited pages.
Oxford Reference is another good place to begin a research project and may be found on the Dictionaries, Encyclopedias and Handbooks page of the A-Z Databases list.
Happy Researching!
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