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CSP 63
Living History: 1587 China and 1945 India [Jung-Kim]

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 DS 701 to DS 799.9 [History of Asia - China]. Below are some specific reference sources you may find helpful:

Gale Virtual Reference Library: Encyclopedia of World Cultures Volume No.6: Russia and Eurasia/China 
Cultural Atlas of China 
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of China
Companion to Chinese history

The following reference sources are older but may still be relevant for your research topic:

Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368-1644
A Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China  

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: "ming dynasty"

keyword: Confucianism

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

Confucianism
Philosophy, Confucian
China -- History -- Ming dynasty, 1368-1644
China -- Politics and government -- 1368-1644
China -- Civilization -- 960-1644

Advanced searches, combining subject headings with key words or phrases, yield a manageable number of targeted results. Try replacing the keywords with topic specific searches for your research. Here are a few examples:
[Subject] Ming AND [ANY] (wom?n OR gender OR feminis*)
[Subject] Ming  AND [Any] econom**
[Subject] Confucianism AND [ANY] wom?n

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 63: 

Historical Abstracts
Index to books, articles, and other materials in world history from 1450 to the present (excluding the United States and Canada).

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.

 JSTOR
Full-text archive of high-impact academic journals in many disciplines.

Social Sciences Full Text (WilsonWeb)
Find citations, abstracts, and substantial full-text for international, English-language periodicals in sociology, anthropology, geography, economics, political science, and law.

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

IGCS: Philosophy and Religion
 http://sun.sino.uni-heidelberg.de/igcs/igphil.htm

INTUTE: Arts and Humanities - Confucianism
www.intute.ac.uk/artsandhumanities/cgi-bin/browse.pl?id=200660

Classical Historiography for Chinese History
 www.princeton.edu/~classbib/

Council on East Asian Libraries
www.eastasianlib.org/

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: "history of china"

 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 03/19/2008.

We welcome your Comments and Suggestions.

 

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