Site Map :: Occidental College > Library > Services > Instruction
 

CSP 52
Collegiate Sexualities [Tobin]

Information Found Here!

Starters
Books
Articles
Websites
More Help
 Topic Starters and Idea Generators
Encyclopedias and other types of reference sources are useful for answering questions. They offer convenient overviews to your topic, timelines, background and other information, often with bibliographic citations providing additional sources for your topic. 

Go to our Reference Shelves and browse around the call numbers HQ 12-449 [Sexual Life] HQ 1075 [Sex Role] HQ 1088-1090.7 [Men], HQ 1101-2030.7 [Women. Feminism]. Below are some specific reference sources you may find helpful:

International Encyclopedia of Marriage and Family [Electronic Resource]
New Dictionary of the History of Ideas [Electronic Resource]
Encyclopedia of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history in America
Wimmin, wimps & wallflowers : an encyclopaedic dictionary of gender and sexual orientation bias in the United States  
Contemporary youth culture : an international encyclopedia
Encyclopedia of women and gender : sex similarities and differences and the impact of society on gender

Books: OASys and LINK+
OASys is Oxy's Catalog, which lists books, journals, online resources, and other library holdings. The LINK+  catalog combines the holdings of over 30 participating libraries.

To get started, you might try a keyword search in OASys. Be sure to notice the subject headings for the best items on your topic. Click on those headings to get more resources. Need more? Click over to LINK+ and continue your searching there. Need even more? WorldCat includes over 54 million entries from more than 45,000 libraries. You may place Interlibrary Loan requests. (Slower than LINK+)

Suggested Keyword Searches for this Course

Keywords will differ depending on the focus of your research. Here are some obvious examples.
 

keyword: sexuality
keyword: identity
keyword: queer
keyword: “safe sex”

keyword: “sexual revolution”

keyword: dating

keyword: relationships

keyword: partners

Tips:
Remember to be flexible with your terminology and try several different searches.
Use synonyms.
Truncate terms to retrieve records that mention all variations of the word in question.
To narrow search results, limit your search to certain locations [Book Stacks, Special Coll] or to specific Material Types [Elect. Resource, Text (Book)].
Caution: In a library catalog, keywords are usually found in the Notes, Title, and Subject Headings fields. Therefore, keyword searches may produce huge results or results that include the keyword(s) but be irrelevant to your topic.

Suggested Subject Headings for this Course

Gender Identity
Lesbians
Bisexuality
Transgender People
College Students
Youth - Sexual Behavior

Advanced searches, combining subject headings with key words or phrases, yield a manageable number of targeted results. Here are a few examples:
[Subject] gender identity AND [ANY] (college OR student*)
[Subject] college students AND [ANY] (sex OR sexuality)
[Subject] sex AND [ANY] (youth OR students)
[Subject] China AND [ANY] sexuality

For more assistance with searching for books, please see Finding Books.

Articles in Magazines, Newspapers and Journals
Articles provide a variety of information ranging from entertainment to scholarly research. To search for articles you use indexes or databases that may include more than one type of article.  Learn how to recognize and distinguish between the different types of publications (academic, popular, etc.) and select the articles that fit your need the best.
For clues to identifying various citations, click here 

Selected Library Research Databases for CSP 52: 

Social Science Citation Index
Fully indexes 1,725 journals across 50 social sciences disciplines, and it indexes individually selected, relevant items from over 3,300 of the world's leading scientific and technical journals.

GenderWatch (Proquest)  
 Full-text database of articles, reports, pamphlets, papers and conference proceedings devoted to women's and gender issues.

ERIC (CSA)
Find citations and abstracts for journal articles and other documents broadly related to education. (Uses CSA Illumina interface).

PsychINFO (CSA)
PsycINFO offers abstracts and indexing of articles, book chapters and other sources in psychology, psychiatry, and related disciplines.

America: History & Life
Citations for articles and books with occasional links to full-text (when available).

Bibliography of Asian Studies
Find citations to Western-language articles, books, chapters, proceedings and more pertaining to East, Southeast, and South Asia, and published worldwide from 1971 to the present.

If you are pursuing a multi-disciplinary approach, be sure to look at the wide range of databases available here at Oxy. DATABASES by Topic.

For more assistance with searching our databases, please see Finding Articles.

Web Sites
Like other information resources, Web sites may include personal opinion, deliberate hoax, credible information and scholarly material. It is very important for you to critically assess the information resource itself, as well as its content.

Some Criteria for Evaluating Information

The Kinsey Institute
 www.indiana.edu/~kinsey/index.html

National Center for Health Statistics
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/

American FactFinder
http://factfinder.census.gov/home/saff/main.html?_lang=en

Internet Archive
 www.archive.org/index.php

Google Scholar
 http://scholar.google.com/

Try a different search engine or a subject directory found on our Public Internet Search Tools page. For example, go to the Librarian's Index to the Internet, and try this search: college AND sexuality.

 For more assistance with searching for web sites, please see Finding Public Web Pages.

 


Page created by Nick Velkavrh.
Page last edited on 08/25/2008.
Reviewed by Marsha Schnirring on 03/18/2008.

We welcome your Comments and Suggestions.

 

Return to Top