What's included? Covers religious history and practices woven into the political, social, cultural, and historical landscape of North America.
What's included? Supports research in areas including drama, music, art history, and filmmaking.
What's included? Authoritative source for facts, history, science, and more. Discover articles, videos, quizzes, games, and features on various topics and events.
What's included? Includies coverage in anthropology, engineering, law, sciences, and more. Offers access to video content from the Associated Press of more than 75,000 videos with a wide variety of topics.
What's included? E-books covering a large selection of academic subjects.
Doing research can involve looking for different types of sources, such as primary and secondary sources. Be familiar with the differences between these two types of sources.
Below are examples of sources that can be used for research for course assignments. Always check with your professor if you have questions!
Databases: These are authoritative resources that index citations or full-text availability of articles, often in PDF format, on a wide variety of subjects. You can go directly to search MCTC Library databases!. Databases can also provide access to specific formats and information content such as photographs, graphs, videos or audio files. The MCTC library subscribes to many databases, such as EBSCOHost provided by the Kentucky Virtual Library. NOTE: Take notice of the TYPE of journal article you are looking at online! Some are scholarly, professional journals while others are written for the general population. A number of sources found in databases are REVIEWS or COMMENTARIES so make sure you are choosing the type of source that is best suited to your research assignment.
Newspapers: These are available in the library in print and through backdates and online through our Newspaper Resources guide.
Government publications: Many such reports and documents are available online through trusted websites such as the U.S. GPO and United States Census Bureau. States and local municipalities also publish information online.
Audiovisual resources: Videos, DVDs, books on CD and audio CDs are available to check out at your campus libraries. MCTC Library also provides online A/V resources such as Encyclopedia Britannica Media Collection and Library of Congress Digital Collection.
Primary documents: These include photographs, letters, diaries, speeches and other first-hand accounts (see boxes below).
Various websites: Try to determine who is producing the information. Wikipedia is a source to be used cautiously and is best used for finding original sources listed at the end of each article for further reference.
Personal Interviews: There may be times when you will need to interview someone with specific, first-hand knowledge to gather information. An interview should be cited in academic papers you write for college.
Whatever sources you use, be sure to include the correct citation of each source within your paper and on your works cited page!