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Research help
This guide will provide assistance with finding scholarly material to support your research papers. For Library research help, please contact Moninder Lalli, Librarian for Sociology / Anthropology by email or Ask a librarian.
Services for Distance Education students
Consult the guide Services for Distance Education students if you are off campus.
Essay
Start Your Research Here - This page gives you an overview of the research process, or in other words how to find materials for your essay.
Selected encyclopedias and handbooks
Get an overview of a topic by using encyclopedias, handbooks or textbook. These types of resources identify key authors, theories and important resources on a topic.
- Encyclopedia of social and cultural anthropology
- International encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences
- Routledge companion to digital ethnography
- Sage eReference
- Sage handbook of social anthropology
For more, see side tab Background information
Find books
Library Catalogue search guide
Search the SFU Library Catalogue: Advanced keyword
E.g. "everyday life" AND (ethonog* OR ethnolog*)
Combine different concepts using AND
Combine same concepts using OR
Use quotation marks to search for a phrase
Use brackets for synonyms
Use asterisk (*) for different endings of words
Use pull-down menu and select, "Source Types" as "Books"
Note: For Catalogue Search, when combining concepts, use CAPITAL letters ( "OR", "AND")
When you find a useful book, click on its "subject" to find more books on the same topic.
Browse by subject
You can also "browse by subject" to find books that have been assigned "Library of Congress Subject Headings" (LCSH).
Change "Title" to "Subject" and enter "subject" terms.
Note: To find books about "cultural anthropology", use the subject term, "Ethnology"
Find articles in databases
Searching the "Databases for a discipline" is a great strategy to view articles that have been written within the scholarly journals of that discipline. For help, refer to the How to find journal articles, What is a scholarly journal? [guide], Finding articles: Advanced search techniques [video 3:13 mins]
If full-text of article is not available from within the database, click on the "Get@SFU" to start a search. If the Library does not provide access, then use the Citation Finder/ILL tab to request a copy from another library (free).
Anthropological perspectives
- Anthropology Plus -- key anthropology journals
- AnthroSource Full-text access to journals produced by the American Anthropological Association
For more, try Anthropology Databases
Library guides
- Library Research Tutorials. Animated tutorials on search techniques for finding books and journal articles
- Finding and evaluating resources on the web
- Evaluating sources [video from Western University 2:16 mins]
- Avoiding plagiarism
- What is a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal?
- How to write an annotated bibliography
- How to place an Inter-Library Loan request
- Search tips for Google and Google Scholar
- Citation or reference management tools (Zotero or Mendeley) - use these tools to manage your citations and to create bibliographies for your papers. For assistance with Zotero or Mendeley, email, citation-managers@sfu.ca.