Philosophy and Race

Constructing a search

Doing library research is an iterative process, which means you have to do many searches, using many different search terms and many different catalogs and databases.

Before you even begin to search, you should think of words that describe the concepts that you are working on. You'll need to search many times to hit all the aspects of your topic.

In order to come up with the number of sources that you need, you will probably need to skim at least twice as many sources to find ones that are really appropriate for your project.

Find Books and more with Tiger and Prospector

Tiger

CC's online catalog. Special features let you create bibliographies to download or email, check your library record, renew books, and request Interlibrary loans. You can also link to the CU-Boulder catalog and other Colorado libraries via Tiger.

Prospector

Unified catalog of many of Colorado academic and public libraries, including CU Boulder, and Colorado State University. You can search all these libraries at once, and easily request books to be sent to you at the Tutt circulation desk.

You can also get books from farther afield via InterLibrary Loan (ILL), but that usually takes more than a week. You will likely find all that you need in Tiger or Prospector; if not, ask for help at the reference desk in getting books on ILL.

Reference Sources

Reference Books

The reference section of the library (on the first floor of the North building, near the Circulation desk) is a great place to start your research. You can get background information or find bibliographies to lead you to more specialized works. Here are some specific reference sources that may be helpful; you should also browse the reference section around these books for similar titles.

• Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy
  Ref. B 41 .B53 1994
• Dictionary of World Philosophy
  Ref. D 41 .I26 2001
• Oxford Companion to Philosophy
  Ref. B 51 .O94 1995
• Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  Ref. B 51 .R68 1998

Online

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

This online encyclopedia is still very much unfinished, but the entries it does have are very well done, and written by scholars

Find articles using indexing and abstracting databases

Tiger will tell you what journals the library subscribes to, but it won't help you find specific articles. For that, you need one of the article databases the library subscribes to.

Sometimes you'll get the "full text" of the article right online, but many other times you will need to look at the citation, and use Tiger or Journal Finder to see if we have access to the journal you need.

I have listed below many of the databases I think will be most useful for this course. You might also want to look at our pages of Philosophy, Sociology, and History databases and online resources for more.

General Subject Databases
EBSCO Academic Search Premier	1988 - current	Provides access to basic journal index and some full text resources. Subject coverage is general and broad. Shows CC holdings.
Humanities Abstracts	1983 - current	Periodicals in archaeology, art, classics, film, folklore, journalism, linguistics,music, the performing arts, philosophy, religion, world history, and world literature.
LexisNexis Academic Universe	1977 - current	Access to popular press material. A product produced by Lexis Nexis. Look here for Newspaper articles, News, and Law articles.
Social Science Abstracts	1983 - current	International, English-language periodicals in sociology, anthropology, geography, economics, political science, and law.

Databases for Specific Disciplines
ATLA Religion Database	1949 - current	Contains more than a million citations from more than a thousand international titles and multi-author works in Religion. Spans over 50 years with selected records going back to 1818. Some full text.
MLA Bibliography	1963 - current	Literature, languages, linguistics, and folklore from over journals and series published worldwide.
Philosopher's Index	1940 - current	Provides indexing and abstracts from over 40 countries of books and over 480 journals of philosophy and related fields. Covers areas of ethics, aesthetics, social philosophy political philosophy, epistemology, metaphysic logic, philosophy of law, religion, science, history, education, language.

Find web resources

You can always search Google, but to make sure that you are finding good scholarly resources that belong on your bibliography, try using the sites below first.

• Voice of the Shuttle is a large directory of humanities sites. Search or browse by topic
• Librarians' Index to the Internet
• Epistime Links to philosophy resources: there are a lot of links here, some more scholarly/authoritative than others--always ask yourself where the information is coming from.