ENG 1A/ENG 1AEX (Cole/Garcia) - Happiness: Finding Materials

Reference materials, like dictionaries, encyclopedias, and source books provide general overviews of topics. This is a great place to start your information gathering, once you have a topic.

Books are great for providing in-depth information about all aspects of your topics. This is a great place to find A LOT of information on your topic in just one resource. Remember that you do not have to read the whole book; just use the index to find the relevant pages for the information you are trying to find.

Articles, including popular, scholarly, and scholarly-peer reviewed from periodicals are great for exploring a narrower, particular aspect of your topic. Each type of article can be found through our online library databases and offer a different sort of view, depending on their purpose.

Open websites, or those freely available on the web using a search engine like Google, are becoming increasingly valuable to researchers as more and more government, educational institutions, and foundations are providing information and data about their work online. While there is A LOT of great information out there, remember that anyone can put information on the open web, so evaluating the material to make sure it is credible becomes more difficult and important