Getting the Context: Online Reference Sources
Use the following online reference sources to find background information, context, and definitions. For other helpful titles, ask us for suggestions.
Oxford Language Dictionaries Online
Fully-searchable bilingual dictionaries for English, Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian, and Arabic.
Oxford Reference.
A full-text database of reliable reference works published by Oxford University Press.
AccessScience from McGraw-Hill
The best source of reliable and interesting articles about any topic in science.
Oxford Research Encyclopedias [aka OREs]
Regularly updated online encyclopedias. Cornell currently has purchased full OREs for twelve subjects: African History, American History, Asian History, Classical Studies, Latin American History, Literature, and Religion in the humanities; Linguistics, Politics, and Psychology in the social sciences; and Climate Science and Global Public Health in the sciences.
Important: Clicking the Available and Free boxes under "Modify your search" provides access to hundreds of articles from ORE titles we have not yet purchased.
Sage Reference Online.
A searchable, full-text database of online reference works that focuses on the applied social sciences.
Gale eBooks [formerly Gale Virtual Reference Library: GVRL].
Online access to many subject encyclopedias
Discover additional reference works in the Dictionaries and Encyclopedias section of Databases and on our online Subject Encyclopedias page.
Reading Citations in Bibliographies
Learn how to tell the difference between a book, a journal or magazine article, and an article in a book in a reference list/bibliography in this 90-second video. Research Minutes: How to Read Citations.
