First Year Seminar 15: Secrets and Lies
Professor Sarat
Fall 2007
For research or help with using the library, contact Susan Edwards (seedwards), 542-2676
Quick Lookups:
OED: Oxford English Dictionary
Britannica Online
Oxford Reference Online: Politics and Social Sciences
Oxford Reference Online: Law
New York Times (back through 3 years from current)
New York Times (and many other newspapers)-- back about 20 years
Finding Articles:
If you need just a few articles, Academic Search Premier and Academic OneFile are good places to start. They have a lot of "fulltext" (the whole article is there), from both popular and scholarly sources.
Finding Books and Videos:
In addition to searching in just the Amherst College Library catalog, you can also search in all Five Colleges. It is easy, quick, and free to get a book sent to you from any of the other four colleges. We also have over 10,000 DVDs and videos -- you can search for them in the catalog, or you can browse in the stacks.
More in-Depth:
Westlaw and LexisNexis are full text databases that includes legal cases, statutes and law reviews. LexisNexis also has an enormous number of newspapers from around the world, and a historic and current collection of public opinion surveys. CSA Political Science Abstracts and IBSS (International Bibliography of the Social Sciences) are two excellent political science databases. They include a mixture of fulltext and citations -- some articles will be fulltext (look for the "ACLinks" button to see if we have it electronically), others will be in bound volumes of journals in the stacks, and others you will have to get through Interlibrary Loan. We have databases in all disciplines.
Citing What You Find:
Different professors require different style manuals (or citation guides) for their papers. Duke has provided a useful compilation (or cheat sheet) of MLA, Turabian, and APA. The University of Wisconsin, Madison provides another guide that also includes Chicago. For legal citation formats, Basic Legal Citation 2007 is very helpful.