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ESL Undergraduate Student Guide

A guide to support international students in ESL 112 and 115 and beyond.

Find Additional Sources

Find more sources!

You can use the information that you already have to find more sources about your topic. Use any article, book, encyclopedia entry, or subject term to generate more articles, books, and encyclopedias, or find additional search terms. 

How?

Scholars cite each other in their articles and books. This is because they are having a scholarly conversation with one another. They critique, comment on, and cite other scholars' work to enhance their own argument. You can use this to your advantage!

  1. Find a book, article, or encyclopedia entry that is relevant to your topic. 
  2. Look at the source's bibliography list. It will usually be the last page under "References" or "Sources."
  3. Skim the sources. Are there any that directly apply to your topic?
  4. To find them easily, write down the citation information of all of the sources that look like they might relate to your paper. Contact the library for help finding these!

Note: This process works best if you do it for multiple sources!

Example

You're writing your paper on the impact farmer's markets and community gardens can have on childhood obesity. You found an article that looks perfect! By using that article's reference list, you find three similar articles, underlined below.  

Endnotes

  1. Cynthia Ogden and others, "Prevalence of Trends in Overweight among U.S. Children and Adolescents, 1999–2000," Journal of the American Medical Association 288, no. 14 (2002): 1728–32. To avoid stigmatizing children, the highest clinical weight classification for children is "overweight" rather than obesity. However, in this paper I use the terms "overweight" and "obesity" interchangeably for children.
  2. Cara B. Ebbeling, Dorota B, Pawlak, and David S. Ludwig, "Childhood Obesity: Public Health Crisis, Common Sense Cure," Lancet 360 (2002): 473-82; S.Y. S. Kimm and E. Obarzanek, "Childhood Obesity: New Pandemic of the New Millennium," Pediatrics 110, no. 5 (2002): 1003–07; Rebecca Puhl and Kelly D. Brownell, "Stigma, Discrimination, and Obesity," in Eating Disorders and Obesity: A Comprehensive Handbook, edited by C. G. Fairburn and K. D. Brownell (New York: Guilford Press, 2002); Richard S. Strauss, "Childhood Obesity and Self-Esteem," Pediatrics 105, no. 1 (2000): e15–e20.
  3. Jeffrey P. Koplan, Catharyn T. Liverman, and Vivica I. Kraak, eds., Preventing Childhood Obesity: Health in the Balance (Washington: National Academies Press, 2004). 
  4. The economic framework or model of eating, physical activity, and obesity is provided in detail in John Cawley, "An Economic Framework for Understanding Physical Activity and Eating Behaviors," American Journal of Preventive Medicine 27, no. 3 (2004): 1–9; John Cawley, "The Economics of Childhood Obesity Policy," in Obesity, Business, and Public Policy, edited by Zoltan Acs and Alan Lyles (Northampton: Edward Elgar, forthcoming); and Darius Lakdawalla and Tomas J. Philipson, "Economics of Obesity," in The Elgar Companion to Health Economics, edited by Andrew Jones (New York: Edward Elgar, 2006). 
  5. James Hill and others, "Obesity and the Environment: Where Do We Go from Here?" Science 299, no. 7 (2003): 853–55. 
  6. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Consumer Price Index—All Urban Consumer" (http://data.bls.gov/PDQ/ outside. jsp?survey=cu [November 15, 2005]).
  7. D. Lakdawalla and T. Philipson, "The Growth of Obesity and Technological Change: A Theoretical and Empirical Examination," Working Paper 8946 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2002).
  8. Daron Acemoglu, "Technical Change, Inequality, and the Labor Market," Journal of Economic Literature 40, no. 1 (2002): 7–72. 
  9. J. P. Robinson and G. Godbey, Time for Life: The Surprising Ways That American Use Their Time (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999); Roland Sturm, "The Economics of Physical Activity: Social Trends and Rationales for Interventions," American Journal of Preventive Medicine 27, no. 3S (2004): 126–35.
  10. D. M. Cutler, E. L. Glaeser, and J. M. Shapiro, "Why Have Americans Become More Obese?" Journal of Economic Perspectives 17, no. 3 (2003): 93–118. 
Putting it all Together

Find three sources you identified to see if they relate to your topic. (You may want to ask a librarian to help you with this step.) Tip: Search for the title of the source in Easy Search. When you find the sources, check their reference lists to find even more sources.