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Contact course instructor
Andy Bourelle

Please direct questions about this page to
Duncan Aldrich

Updated 18 August 2005

Selected Library & Internet Resources

English 102

Background Focus

  • PolicyFile 
    • Contributors include the American Enterprise Institute, Brookings Institution, RAND Corporation, and many others. 
  • CQ Researcher (from November 1991)
    • Full text overviews providing the pros and cons on current controversial issues with complete summaries, bibliographies and time-lines.
  • The Gallup Brain Full text available
    • Searchable archive of 125,000 poll questions, with responses from 3.5 million people interviewed by The Gallup Poll. Also, Gallup Poll News Service articles feature in-depth poll analyses and replicas of related news stories and press releases. 1935- present.
  • Statistical Universe
    • Abstracts and index to U.S. federal & state government publications, and to privately published & international and intergovernmental statistical sources from 1972.
  • Encyclopedia Britannica
    • Online version of the complete encyclopedia with more than 75,000 entries, links to related Internet sites, and Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.

Journal, Magazine, News Reporting, Books

  • Academic Search Premier (EBSCOhost)  
    • Indexes 7,800+ scholarly journals, with full text for 4,000 titles. Covers social sciences, humanities, education, computer science and engineering, general science, medicine, ethnic studies, and more. 1965- present for selected titles.
  • Academic Universe (Lexis/Nexis)  
    • Index and full text to news, business, legal, medical, and reference materials and links to congressional and statistical information.
  • Gender File  
    • Full text collection of articles covering women's and gender topics.
  • CQ.Com  
    • Comprehensive legislative tracking service for U.S. Congressional news, bills, committees, and members, with full-text CQ reports, federal documents, and transcripts. Users may customize reports and alerts.
  • Reno Gazette Journal  
    • Past seven issues of RGJ freely available - archived articles can be purchased from RGJ or used in the UNR Library.
  • UNR Library Catalog
    • Find from nearly one million books, journals, newspapers, videos, and more....

Web-Based Information Sources

Citation Style Guides

Information Ethics

Critically Evaluating Information Sources

The tale of two sites:

www.georgewbush.com
www.georgewbush.org

When working on any class assignment it is important to assess critically the information resources you use to assure that your research conclusions are well supported. Simply put, can the source be trusted? And why?  Is the source reliable and authoritative?  When we do homework from a text book we assume the textbook is reliable.  When using other resources - books, articles, Web pages, and so on -- how do we assess their reliability? 

For example, what are the credentials of the author of this site?
Ancient Astronauts

Several Web pages provide insight into critical evaluation of source materials, see:

Suggested Keywords for Research Projects

When looking up information needed for research projects,  the selection of good "keywords" (search terms) is critical to a successful search.  Tips for selecting keywords are provided in the Library Research Guide.

Several keywords you may find useful for your English 102 assignment are listed below.

A final tip on finding good sources is that when you find one item (or several) that is exactly on your topic, scan the footnotes and bibliography of those items for good leads to similar materials.