Journalism and Creative Nonfiction

Welcome to the Tisch Library guide for Journalism and Creative Nonfiction. This guide includes the following sections. Use the menu to explore each section.

• Background Research - These sources provide important background and contextual information on your subjects. These resources include encyclopedias, bibliographies, databases for scholarly literature, as well as statistics and datasets.
• Creative nonfiction - This section contains items of interest for those writing creative nonfiction. These include resources in JumboSearch as well as other online materials.
• Journalism - This section contains items of interest for those doing journalism. These include resources in JumboSearch, online materials, and fact checkers.
• Select Books on Writing- This section contains select books available from Tisch Library on writing style and other topics.
• Citation Guides- This section contains items resources for citation guides including APA, Chicago, and MLA.

If you don't find what you are looking for or need help navigating this guide or any of the resources it contains, don't hesitate to contact the author of this guide or Ask Us.

What is background information? You probably already use Wikipedia, which is a background source and includes lots of helpful information. But there's a lot more than Wikipedia!  Background information comes from places like dictionaries and subject encyclopedias (the "pedia" in Wikipedia) . Background sources provide context and answer straightforward questions. They include definitions, statistics, and other details. You can use this type of source to:

• Define your terms
• Help narrow your research topic
• Find data to support your thesis
• Identify keywords and main ideas to use as search terms.

The following resources can help you learn to gather high-quality background information.

Find scholarly literature

Social Science data and statistics

The following resources are just a select few of data sets available through Tisch Library. For a complete list and help with datasets please visit the Social Science Data and Statistics Resources Guide.

Using subject terms in JumboSearch

Books in the library catalog are tagged with subject terms to help patrons find books on specific topics. Here is a list of suggested subject terms to use in JumboSearch:

•  American essays -- 21st century
• Biography as a literary form
• Creative nonfiction
• Essay -- Authorship
• Food writing
• Natural history -- United States
• Travelers' writings, American History and criticism

And remember, you can always use these subject terms to revise or narrow your search. For example, try this type of search string to discover creative nonfiction on a specific topic: collecting AND creative nonfiction.

Online resources for Creative Nonfiction

Tools for journalists

Tisch Library's newspapers

Tisch Library's guide to newspapers in our collection can help you to locate local, national, and international news sources, including current and historic. If you want to have a look at how journalists have covered an issue over time, explore this guide.

Journalism resources in Tisch Library

Books in the library catalog are tagged with subject terms to help patrons find books on specific topics. Here is a list of suggested subject terms to use in JumboSearch:

• American newspapers
• British newspapers
• Journalism, Commercial
• Journalism -- United States
• Journalism and literature
• Reportage literature

And remember, you can always use these subject terms to revise or narrow your search. For example, try this type of search string to discover journalism on a specific topic: Vietnam War AND journalism

Journalism on journalism 

Fact checking

The following online resources are useful for quick fact checking of contemporary events.

Style

Are you interested in English prose style? Are you looking for guidance about what to do and not to do? These books have you covered!

Books on the writing process

So you've sorted out your style--now what? These books can help you with the writing and publication process.

APA Citation Style is frequently used in the social sciences and natural/physical sciences. The first style rules were published in 1929 and the American Psychological Association has produced six editions of the Publication Manual since then.

APA style uses Parenthetical In-Text Citations within the main text of your paper. The sources that you refer to are then compiled into a References List at the end of the paper.

One key feature of APA style is that it now includes DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers), unique codes that are increasingly assigned to published articles.

Chicago Citation Style is used most often in historical research, although other humanities and social science disciplines sometimes use it as well. The first edition of the Chicago Manual of Style was published in 1906 by the University of Chicago Press.

Chicago style actually offers two different options for in-text citations:

1. Notes and Bibliography: Numbers within a paper correspond to footnotes (bottom of the page) or endnotes (end of the chapter or whole work). This is the more commonly used version of Chicago style, and typically this is the version people mean when they just say "Chicago."
    
2.  Author-Date: This version is similar to MLA, using parenthetical in-text citations within a paper.

In both variations of Chicago, the Bibliography at the end of the paper should include complete citations for all of the sources you referenced in a paper, and may also include sources that you consulted but did not end up paraphrasing, summarizing, or quoting in the paper's text.

MLA Citation Style is most frequently used in the humanities (literature, languages, art). The MLA Handbook was first published by the Modern Language Association in 1951.

MLA style uses Parenthetical In-Text Citations throughout your paper, with authors and page numbers. There is also a Works Cited page at the end of the paper with full citations.