Selecting the best or most appropriate finding aid for identifying sources depends almost entirely on the context of your research project. There is no single database or web search interface that will work for every research context; instead, you'll need to match your specific research needs to a variety of options. 

1. Start with the information provided in tertiary sources! Look up specific titles of books in Primo, or journal titles (not article titles) in Primo's Journal Search. Use the vocabulary in the subject encyclopedia entries as search terms in databases.
2. Do an author search in Primo or a subject database. Which scholars are working on your topic? Many researchers will write about the same topic throughout their career. Searching by an author's name may help you gather additional information.
3. Mine the bibliographies and footnotes in other secondary sources. You may find one secondary source that is not quite right for your project; however, it may cite another scholarly source that would be just right!
4. When searching Primo or a database, pay attention to the subject headings in your results. You can use the vocabulary or click to do a new search for that heading. You'll be surprised at what you discover this way! 
5. Select the best sources, not just the most convenient sources. This may mean requesting a book from SUMMIT and/or an article from Tipasa, both of which take about two to five days to arrive.

If your topic has been approached from other disciplinary frameworks, you may wish to familiarize yourself with that scholarly literature, with the aim of showing how a philosophical approach can add to our understanding of the issues. Use the library's subject pages to explore more options.

Google Scholar can help you find articles which have cited an article that you have found. Frequent citation is often (but not always!) a marker for a particularly influential scholarly work.

Using citations to search for scholarly literature can help you think more broadly about your research topic within the larger discipline, and help you answer the following questions:

• Who/what are the big names and articles in this area?
• Who is this research in conversation with?

Step 1: When looking at search results, check for the 'Cited by X' link underneath each result. That will tell you how many subsequent articles (that Google Scholar is aware of) have cited this particular article or book.

Step 2: Click that link, and you will be taken to a new set of results, all of which have cited the original article, which will still be listed at the top of the page. 

By consulting book reviews of the scholarly works you are reading, you can gain a better understanding of the place of a particular work within the field.  Here are a few tips for locating book reviews:

• Check to see when your book was published. If it was published more than twenty years ago, and you aren't finding reviews online, you may need to look beyond online sources and check print indexes.
• If you're having trouble finding a review, check with a librarian for help and to cover all your bases, but remember that some books are never reviewed. If that's the case, think about what that might mean about the book's scholarly importance.
• In many databases, you can specifically limit your search results to just reviews.

For philosophy books, start with the resources below and branch out as needed.

If your article is not available at Collins Library, you've got another option for getting it. Use Tipasa, our interlibrary loan service.

Tipasa is linked to your library account so you'll need to log in to use it.

Once you are logged in, either go directly to Tipasa and manually enter the information, or, if you're using a database, look for a shortcut link to automatically fill out the form:

Allow at least a week for the article to come. If your article is delivered in electronic format, you'll receive an email with a link to follow as soon as it's arrived.