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REL/ASIA 172: Tibetan Buddhism and Society

Prof. Annabella Pitkin, Fall 2023

Books, ebooks, and reference sources

Possible subject headings to use in ASA:

  • Buddhism>China>Tibet>
  • Buddhism>China>Tibet Autonomous Region

Watch the video below to learn more about searching in ASA: the online library catalog.

Relevant databases

Characteristics:

  • Cover numerous topics
  • May contain multiple types of sources (e.g. popular, trade, scholarly)
  • Audience = educated readership

Examples:

View the video below for tips on searching for articles.

Characteristics:

  • Pertain to a particular discipline
  • Often contain scholarly sources, known as peer-reviewed articles
  • Articles are written and reviewed by experts in the field
  • Academic audience
  • Showcase original research

Examples:

Search Techniques

1.  Once you know your research interest, formulate it into a question and use the most important parts to generate keywords. Here, "Star Wars" and "myth" are the key parts of the topic, so those will be the keywords. 

2. You can then use Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) to better refine your search. 

 

 

Using citations to find more sources

Another excellent way to discover additional resources is to look at the works cited page of a scholarly article that you have already discovered to be useful to your research. The author of the article is an expert in their field and has done a lot of research on their topic. It is likely that at least one of the works that they cite will be relevant to your research.