HIST 101: US History: Arts, Literature and Identity

Guide to writing history papers

ljones@library.berkeley.edu (Lynn Jones) — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 12:34:30 -0700

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ljones@library.berkeley.edu (Lynn Jones) — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 11:09:15 -0700

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Interlibrary Borrowing

ljones@library.berkeley.edu (Lynn Jones) — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 07:55:37 -0700

As a Berkeley student you are eligible to use books and articles from other libraries around the United States.

Check OskiCat to make sure UC Berkeley does not own the material you want.

Provide a full and accurate bibliographic citation, including author, title, place and date of publication, and series. You can get citations from professors, from Melvyl, from other articles, from Google scholar. Verify your citations before submitting them for ILL.

Is it a scholarly source?

ljones@library.berkeley.edu (Lynn Jones) — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 14:26:43 -0800

Your instructor wants you to use scholarly [or 'peer reviewed'] sources. What does she mean?

Authoritative- written by a recognized expert in the field. How do you know? The PhD is one sign; employment by a university is another.
Peer reviewed- before publishing, the article was vetted by other scholars in the field. How do you know? Try searching the journal title in Google and read the publisher's blurb.
Audience- written for scholars and experts in the field. How do you know? The level of the language is usually a give away. It will be technical and formal.
Includes a bibliography and/or footnotes with citations of sources used.

Scholarship is always changing. Try to find the most recent scholarly sources you can.

The Research Process

ljones@library.berkeley.edu (Lynn Jones) — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 10:02:39 -0700

Choose a topic.

Do a brain dump: Note down what you already know about your topic, including

Names of people, organizations, companies, time period you are interested in, places of interest [countries, regions, cities]

Fill in the gaps in your knowlege: get background information from encyclopedias or other secondary sources. Wikipedia can be good here.

Select the best places/ databases to find information on your topic. Look under the History Databases tab of this guide for article database suggestions. Or use a catalog like Oskicat or Melvyl to search for books and other resources.

Use nouns from your brain dump as search terms.

Evaluate what you find. Change search terms to get closer to what you really want.

Refine Your Topic - Using the information you have gathered, determine if your research topic should be narrower or broader. You may need to search basic resources again using your new, focused topics and keywords.

Take a look this short tutorial on beginning your research for more ideas.

Campus Library Map

ljones@library.berkeley.edu (Lynn Jones) — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 11:50:03 -0700

Click on the image below to see a larger interactive version of the campus library map.

You can also view/download a PDF map of library locations. For library contact information and building addresses, visit our directory.

Primary Source Searching - Names

ljones@library.berkeley.edu (Lynn Jones) — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 13:27:54 -0800

One of the most powerful ways to find primary sources in the Library is to use the names of people. An essential part of your background reading should be to note down names of people involved in your topics.

Names can be searched in the catalogs [Oskicat and Melvyl] in specialized ways: as authors or as subjects. Even people you do not consider authors in the conventional sense may be listed as authors, if:

their correspondence is available
their manuscripts are available
interviews with them are available
their diaries are available
published versions of these are available

When searching for primary sources, it's a good idea always to search those names as authors, as well as keywords. Works where the person is listed as an author will always be primary sources.

Finding Primary Sources overview

ljones@library.berkeley.edu (Lynn Jones) — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 12:18:00 -0800

Primary sources can be found in a variety of library tools:

Catalogs: OskiCat and Melvyl
Online book and text collections
Primary Source databases provided by the Library
Vetted sites on the web:

For specific search strategies, see the Library's Guide to Finding Historical Primary Source s

Only in the Library

ljones@library.berkeley.edu (Lynn Jones) — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 11:44:12 -0800

"It's all free on the Internet, right?" "Why should I go through the library's website to find sources for my paper?"

The Web is a great source for free, publicly available information, but not for thousands of electronic books, journal articles, and scholarly resources that are available only to the campus community. Resources like Lexis-Nexis, Web of Science, Academic Search Complete, and ARTstor are "invisible" to Google. You will not see results from these databases in the results of a Google search.*

Through the Library website, you can access hundreds of different licensed databases containing journal articles, electronic books, maps, images, government and legal information, current and historical newspapers, digitized primary sources, and more.

Want to find out more? Get started exploring the Library's electronic resources, or find out how to get access to licensed resources from off-campus.

Finding Other Databases

ljones@library.berkeley.edu (Lynn Jones) — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 14:20:59 -0700

Search an article database to find citations (title, author, title of journal, date, page numbers) for articles on a particular topic. The Library gives you access to over 200 article databases covering different disciplines.

1. Think about which academic disciplines might write about your topic. Examples: literature, film, anthropology, history...

2. Find the appropriate article database by subject (academic discipline or department). Look for "Recommended" databases.

Library home > Articles > Article Databases by Subject

3. You may need databases that cover diffferent types of materials - historical or ethnic newspapers, congressional information, primary sources, etc:

Library home > Electronic Resources > Electronic Resources, Types A-Z >

Research Advisory Service

ljones@library.berkeley.edu (Lynn Jones) — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:40:21 -0800

Research Advisory Service for Cal Undergraduates

Book a 30-minute appointment with a librarian who will help refine and focus research inquiries, identify useful online and print sources, and develop search strategies for humanities and social sciences topics (examples of research topics).

Schedule, view, edit or cancel your appointment online (CalNetID required)

This service is for Cal undergraduates only. Graduate students and faculty should contact the library liaison to their department or program for specialized reference consultations.

Citation Management Tools

ljones@library.berkeley.edu (Lynn Jones) — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 10:01:56 -0700

Citation management tools help you manage your research, collect and cite sources, and create bibliographies in a variety of citation styles. Each one has its strengths and weaknesses, but any are easier than doing it by hand!

Zotero: A free plug-in that works exclusively with the Firefox browser: keeps copies of what you find on the web, permits tagging, notation, full text searching of your library of resources, works with Word, and has a free web backup service.
RefWorks - free for UC Berkeley users. It allows you to create your own database by importing references and using them for footnotes and bibliographies. Use the RefWorks New User Form to sign up.
EndNote: may be purchased from UC Berkeley's Software Central.

It's always good to double check the formatting -- sometimes the software doesn't get it quite right.

Using APA 6th? Purdue has produced this very handy quick guide. The fulltext of APA 6th is not available online, but we do have print copies in the EdPsych Library in reference and short term reserve at BF76.7 P83 2010

How to Avoid Plagiarism

ljones@library.berkeley.edu (Lynn Jones) — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 11:39:23 -0700

In order to avoid plagiarism, you must give credit when

You use another person's ideas, opinions, or theories.
You use facts, statistics, graphics, drawings, music, etc., or any other type of information that does not comprise common knowledge.
You use quotations from another person's spoken or written word.
You paraphrase another person's spoken or written word.

Recommendations

Begin the writing process by stating your ideas; then go back to the author's original work.
Use quotation marks and credit the source (author) when you copy exact wording.
Use your own words (paraphrase) instead of copying directly when possible.
Even when you paraphrase another author's writings, you must give credit to that author.
If the form of citation and reference are not correct, the attribution to the original author is likely to be incomplete. Therefore, improper use of style can result in plagiarism. Get a style manual and use it.
The figure below may help to guide your decisions.

This content is part of the Understanding Plagiarism tutorial created by the Indiana University School of Education.

Zotero Tips

ljones@library.berkeley.edu (Lynn Jones) — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 10:04:46 -0700

If you've never used Zotero before, use the QuickStart Guide to get started.

Change your preferences if you want Zotero to

set your default citation style
search the full text of pdfs you save
Automatically attach associated PDFs and other files when saving items

To use Zotero to find specific articles in our library's databases, set up the Open URL resolver with this link: http://ucelinks.cdlib.org:8888/sfx_local?

An in-depth discussion of the relative virtues of Endnote and Zotero,

Citation Management Tools

ljones@library.berkeley.edu (Lynn Jones) — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 13:46:02 -0700

Zotero: A free plug-in that works exclusively with the Firefox browser: keeps copies of what you find on the web, permits tagging, notation, full text searching of your library of resources, works with Word, and has a free web backup service.
RefWorks - free for UC Berkeley users. It allows you to create your own database by importing references and using them for footnotes and bibliographies. Use the RefWorks New User Form to sign up.
EndNote: may be purchased from UC Berkeley's Software Central.

It's always good to double check the formatting -- sometimes the software doesn't get it quite right.

What is This? Reading Citations...

ljones@library.berkeley.edu (Lynn Jones) — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 16:09:04 -0800

Finding a citation in a bibliography (online or in print) is a great way to find more resources on your topic.

However, you have to be able to read the citation in order to find the item in the UCB Library.

The most common citations are for books, articles, and book chapters. Can you tell which citation below is for a book? For a chapter? For an article?

Orbe, Mark P. "Representations of Race in Reality TV: Watch and Discuss." Critical Studies in Media Communication 25.4 (2008): 345-352.

Winters, Loretta I., and Herman L. DeBose. New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st Century. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications Inc., 2003.

Fine, Michelle, and Adrienne Asch. “Disability Beyond Stigma: Social Interaction, Discrimination, and Activism.” The Culture and Psychology reader. Eds. Goldberger, Nancy Rule; Veroff, Jody Bennet New York: New York University Press. 1995. 536-558

Google Scholar

ljones@library.berkeley.edu (Lynn Jones) — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 13:23:08 -0700

Google Scholar is an easy way to do interdisciplinary research, and with some settings changes can become even more useful. You need a Google account to use these features.

Set up a Google Scholar Alert to be automatically notified when new articles are added to Google on topics of interest:

Do your search in Google Scholar. Look in the green toolbar for the envelope icon, and click it. New items will be sent to your email account as they are found by Google.

Make Google display links to full text of articles that Berkeley subscribes to:

Open Scholar. Click on the gear icon in the upper right corner, and choose 'scholar preferences'. In the new window, scroll down to 'Library Links', type the word Berkeley. Choose University of California, Berkeley-- UC eLinks, and Open Worldcat Search.

Ever wanted to trace an article’s impact? Google now permits searching within citing articles.

Do a Google Scholar search. Click on the "Cited by" link under a citation and select the "Search within articles citing..." checkbox.

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