HIST 1107: Pirates, Smugglers, Merchants, and Trade: Exploring Early America's Economy (Spring 2009)  Tags: pirates piracy history  

Evaluating the sources you find is a crucial step in the process of scholarly research. The questions you ask about books, periodical articles, or multimedia sources are similar whether you're looking at a citation to the item or have the item in hand.

How to Critically Analyze Information Sources.
Lists some of the critical questions you should ask when you consider the appropriateness of a particular book, article, media resource, or Web site for your research.

Distinguishing Scholarly from Non-Scholarly Periodicals: A Checklist of Criteria.
Shows how to evaluate periodicals by looking at their format, intended audience, and appearance.

Evaluating Web Resources
Lists ways to analyze the Web sites you find.

Selected reputable Websites:

The Voice of the Shuttle covers all periods of history. Digitized video collections were recently added.

Cornell's Africana Studies Research Guides

Cornell Research Guide for American Indian Studies

Cornell Research Guide for Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

The History E-Book Project a collection of full-text books from the American Council of Learned Societies.

MLA Citation Style

MLA Citation Style (CUL Gateway Help pages)
Answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about MLA citation style.

MLA Style (MLA's web site)
Provides some FAQ's; however, this site does not provide the full style manual online.

MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (6th ed.) Olin and Uris Libraries Z253 .M68 2003 (located at the Reference Desks) APA Citation Style

Chicago Manual of Style

The Chicago Manual of Style (online). 15th ed. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1993. (Olin Reference Desk Z 253 U69x 2003; also Uris)  The basics online: Chicago Manual of Style.

Managing Information using Bibliographic/Citation Software

RefWorks is a web-based program that allows you to easily collect, manage, and organize bibliographic references by interfacing with databases. RefWorks also interfaces directly with Word, making it easy to import references and incorporate them into your writing, properly formatted according to the style of your choice. For more information and to sign up for an account: http://www.refworks.cornell.edu