Research Guides: Starting Your Thesis (BMC): Getting Started with Background Reading

Books

Scholarly monographs on your topic, as well as editted volumes with chapters specific to your topic, may contain valuable background and contextual information for your research.

Tripod Books & More
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Search the Tripod Books tab for scholarly monographs on your topic. Tip: use the Related Items and Subject Heading links to find other sources on the same topic.

Google Books This link opens in a new window
Online library of more than a million books digitized from the collections of Harvard, Stanford, Michigan, and many other university libraries. Tip: follow the "Find it in a library" link (on the left side) to see if the Tri-College libraries hold the book.
Worldcat.org This link opens in a new window
Publicly available version of Worldcat, a catalog of the holdings of books, journals, and other materials held by OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) member libraries. Tip: if you are on campus, a "Search Tripod" link will show up in any item record.

Background Reading

To get a big picture view of your topic and to find helpful bibliographies, you may want to start with a Reference source.

Search Tripod for your topic + keywords like "bibliograph*", "handbook", "companion", "encyclopedia", "read* guide", etc. Our Research Guides for particular subjects and courses will often include a "Background Information" or "Getting Started" tab with links to these types of sources.

We also have a few multidisciplinary resources that may be helpful:

Annual Reviews
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Annual Reviews offer comprehensive, timely collections of critical reviews written by leading scholars. Annual Reviews volumes are published each year for focused disciplines within the Biomedical, Life, Physical, and Social Sciences including Economics. BMC, HVC and SC have different collections of annual reviews.
Oxford Bibliographies Online
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Includes introductions to each topic area, guides to introductory works, textbooks, guidebooks, journals, reference works etc., and links to useful websites. Bibliographies are browseable by subject area and keyword searchable.
Cambridge Companions Online
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Offers subject or theme based collections of companion e-books within a richly functional, fully cross-searchable online environment. Areas covered include literature, classics, philosophy, religion, culture and music.
Congressional Quarterly (CQ) Researcher
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Original reporting and analysis on issues in the news, focusing on the economy, education, the environment, health, international affairs, social trends, and technology. Published weekly, 1991-present.
Very Short Introductions
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Very Short Introductions offer concise introductions to a diverse range of subject areas.

Wikipedia
Wikipedia is helpful for getting started on a topic and for finding leads to other major publication. Keep in mind that Wikipedia is written collaboratively by the readers of the website. It is not generally considered a scholarly source and many professors will not accept it as a cited source.