EALC 200: Approaches to the Study of East Asian Cultures (HC/BMC) - Fall 2023

Finding reference books

What are reference sources?

You have already worked with one kind of reference source: bibliographies. A reference source gives you a more general overview of a topic and will often point you toward other resources which will provide more specific information. Having looked at some Oxford Bibliographies, however, it may be useful to look at other reference sources, especially if the Oxford Bibliography you found was much more general than your topic.

Reference sources often have titles containing words like these:

• Companion
• Dictionary
• Encyclopedia
• Guide
• Handbook
• Index
• Introduction
• Manual

Select examples of reference titles

Brainstorm about your own search based on these books.

Finding reference sources with Tripod

Tripod      is often the easiest place to begin looking for books, reference or otherwise. (There are also some databases that are useful for this, however.)

Let's say you are looking for a guide to common symbols and themes in Japanese art. You can start by typing "Japanese art symbols" into the first search box you see in Tripod. This is a simple search.

But keep in mind that simple search is often imprecise and often returns far more results than you could reasonably sift through.

Getting better results: filters

After you click on Advanced Search to the right of the search box we used before, you will see a search page with more options to specify what kinds of results we want to see.

• Set the Material Type to Books.
• Set the Start Date to 2000. (Leaving the end date blank allows the most recent results to appear.)

This leads us to what looks like it may be a helpful book, Symbols of Japan: thematic motifs in art and design.

In the next tab, we will look at a case in which you need to make results even more specific, and will give an example of how to use rows and multiple related terms in your search. 

Focusing results with rows, operators, and synonyms

Even though the item we just found does not have these words in the title, many reference books have words like guide, introduction, encyclopedia, handbook, companion, dictionary, or index in theirs. One strategy we might use to look for reference books is to look only for things which have those in the title, as in this example.

Tripod, like many databases, allows us to specify exactly how the words we search for relate to the things we want to see.

• Here we are telling it to show us only items that have these words in the title.
• By putting these words together on a single row and joining them together with OR, we've told Tripod to search for items that have at least one of these words in the title.

We can also tell Tripod to search for different things in different rows.

• In this example, we also searched for these words in the title, but it is also sometimes useful to search in the subject words.
• Note that we used the asterisk * operator with one of the words, which will get Buddhism, Buddhist, and maybe other variations.

In the last row, we told Tripod to look for some words that are either synonyms or at least similar in meaning.

• This is an extremely useful skill for searching in general. If one word does not get you many good results, try to think of another related term, or several related ones as in this example. As you read more about your topic, you will pick up more related terms.