How to Use This Guide
Welcome to the Tisch Library guide for First-Year Writing classes. This guide is intended to provide help with the research process and resources to assist in completing your writing assignments. Here's what you'll find inside:
The Research Process - This page introduces basic steps and strategies for conducting research for your writing assignments and includes an outline of the typical process that can move you from finding sources to being able to identify the types of sources you need and discover where they're located.
Getting to Know Your Topic - This page helps you to get started doing your research and answers the question, "What do you do if you can't cite Wikipedia?" Find sources on this page that provide short introductions to a variety of topics and that will help you to generate keywords before you start to search library databases.
Evaluating Information - This guide will help you to evaluate the variety of resources you will encounter while doing academic research and will help you to recognize different sources and types of information. Keep in mind that the most important question to ask yourself when evaluating information is "Who wrote it?" When we talk about "authoritative" information, the key part of that word is "author." Once you know who wrote something, you can be a better judge of the nature of that information.
Use JumboSearch - This page introduces you to JumboSearch, which is the Tufts' Libraries discovery tool that you can use to find books and articles. You can limit to print or online resources only to see the thousands of books, eBooks, scholarly journal articles, and articles from newspapers and magazines that you have access to.
Use Article Databases - This page includes recommended databases for this class. Keep in mind that article databases don't always include complete copies of the articles they cite, so click the Find it at Tufts button to see if we have an electronic copy.
Cite Your Sources - This guide will help you to learn how to properly cite your research and discover some tools that can help you to manager your citations.
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