Finding Background Sources
Background information on the topic of your group project can help you focus and refine your research. It can provide you with a big picture context within which you can place your own work. It can provide information from reliable sources that provides a framework for readers of the report that your group produces.
Where to start?
- A database called CQ Researcher provides overviews of many current and controversial topics. It's an excellent starting point, providing an overview of the topic, historical background, current situation and future outlook, a chronology, maps and graphs, and a bibliography of additional sources.
- Be sure to use the BU Libraries Search and search for your topic along with a keyword such as: dictionary, encyclopedia or handbook to locate helpful reference sources for your topic.
Finding Books
Click the links below to see results for each topic in BU Libraries Search:
Finding Articles: Journals
Click here to search for journal titles within the the BU Libraries.
Finding Articles: Databases
For a full list of our databases pertaining to Health & Rehabilitation Sciences, click here.
- APA PsycInfo This link opens in a new window Provides access to articles, books and book chapters, and dissertations that cover the scholarly literature in the psychological, social, behavioral, and health sciences. Includes material of relevance to psychologists and professionals in related fields such as psychiatry, management, business, education, social science, neuroscience, law, medicine, and social work.
- Contemporary Women's Issues This link opens in a new window Contemporary Women's Issues provides full-text access to international information on women in over 190 countries. Indexes journals and books, as well as "gray literature" - newsletters, NGO research reports, fact sheets, and other ephemeral literature from research institutes and grassroots organizations.
- General Science Full Text This link opens in a new window A multidisciplinary science database designed for students and non-specialists. Subjects includes astronomy, biology, botany, chemistry, conservation, health, medicine, oceanography, physics, and zoology. Covers leading journals and magazines, biographical sketches, symposia, conferences, review articles, and special issues of journals. Also covers the New York Times Science Section and cites book reviews.
- Oxford Food Symposium on Food and Cookery This link opens in a new window Contains proceedings from an annual symposium to share food research by scholars, enthusiastic amateurs, writers, and chefs from around the world. Volumes of Symposia proceedings prior to the most recent five years available via Google Books and as free downloads.
- Policy Map This link opens in a new window Easy-to-use online mapping and visualization tool. Downloadable U.S. demographic, economic and social data by city, state, zip code, county or census tract. Types of data include crime, housing, health, education and occupations, derived from both public and proprietary sources.
- PubMed This link opens in a new window Comprehensive coverage of abstracts to the biomedical literature. Includes medicine, the allied health disciplines, and biomedical literature. Materials range from 1809 Onwards, with more recent decades better represented.
- Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection This link opens in a new window This database includes the full text of articles from more than 500 journals. It covers a broad range of topics related to psychology and the behavioral sciences including observational and experimental methods, child and adolescent psychology, and many areas of counseling.
- Social Sciences Full Text This link opens in a new window Social Sciences Full Text provides access to hundreds of English language journals in the social sciences. About two-thirds of the journals are peer-reviewed.
- STAT+ This link opens in a new window STAT+ offers original reporting and analysis of breaking news in the life sciences and pharmaceutical industry. Create an account by clicking on Subscribe and using your @bu.edu email address and a different, non-BU password
- Web of Science This link opens in a new window This database is a core general science resource, covering all aspects of scientific literature. It also has a number of tools that make it a unique resource for finding scholarly literature. Item records come with links both to the works cited by the paper in question and the future works that cite that paper. Web of Science also allows the user to set up email alerts for specific authors or topics, provides researcher profiles, and to use associated journal metrics provided by the vendor.
