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Wellesley College Research Guides

WRIT 201: Intensive Writing Workshop

Get Started with SuperSearch

SuperSearch can be a great place to start to find out what's out there on your topic. SuperSearch will find books, journal articles, films, news, and almost everything else the library has — from popular to scholarly sources. You can use the filters on the results screen to improve your results.

For searching with more focus and precision, try one of the databases recommended on this guide.

SuperSearch Tips

SuperSearch can be a great place to get a panoramic view of a topic from a wide variety of sources from multiple disciplines. Some tips:

  • Start with a broad keyword search and scan the results to discover different themes, approaches, and interpretations, e.g., 
    • food justice
  • Scan the Subjects that come up in your results list for useful terms to try in new searches.
  • Use the filters to focus your search. For example, limit to books and e-books or scholarly (peer-reviewed) journals, or use the publication date filter to find articles or books published the last 5 or 10 years.

Get Background & Overviews in Reference Sources

Reference sources such as specialized encyclopedias, handbooks, and dictionaries are a good place to gather factual information, get an overview of a topic, find ideas for keywords, and get bibliographies that point to key books and articles on a topic. 

Below are different resources for finding reference sources.

Reference Sources in SuperSearch

Search here to use the "Encyclopedia articles & more" filter in SuperSearch, which finds articles in a range of reference works from several databases. For more focused searching, and to find some Reference content that SuperSearch doesn't have, search one of the individual databases below.

Reference Databases

When you search the following databases, you're searching multiple encyclopedias and other reference sources at once. 

You can also search or browse individual encyclopedias. Here are some selected titles related to food studies.