Week 3: secondary research
As we move into using more secondary as well as primary sources, I want to help out a bit with finding good secondary sources.
When historians use the term “scholarly article”, they usually mean something published in a peer-reviewed journal. Because their research is reviewed by other historians, it is considered more in-depth than, say, a magazine article or a website like the BBC. We want scholarly articles.
MiraCosta’s library has access to a couple of databases, JSTOR an EBSCO, that subscribe to articles from certain journals. While not everything is there, some possibilities are:
For Nathan – English Economic Review, The English Historical Review, Journal of British Studies, and Victorian Studies might prove useful. These are all indexed in JSTOR.
For Van – The topic is more difficult, because it overlaps history and other fields. You might want to try the database History Reference Center, type a search term like “fashion” into the search, and use the checkboxes for Full Text and Academic Journals.
Hope this helps!
Thanks for these resources! I will spend some time familiarizing myself with the library databases so future posts have more credible secondary sources than Wikipedia and History.net
Ok thank you! I will definitely peruse the databases a bit this week using your suggestions