Secondary sources are materials that reflect on or present research about subjects or experiences of others. These include materials published as books, articles, conference presentations, any variety of formats. Starting here gives you a chance to listen in on the conversation of researchers who've gone before you and get an idea of what people are talking about, where they're doing their talking, and what sort of terminology they use.
Discover@MU searches the widest variety of library materials from all four UM campuses and is a good place to start. Full text is often immediately available, or the FindIt@MU links will take you to full text or a request form to have a pdf delivered to your email at no cost. Books that are located at other libraries can be requested to be delivered to Columbia for you to use.
Searching within the full-text of books or articles will sometimes help you find specific information that may not immediately appear in a database search. Databases are often searching just a citation or brief abstract, so can't retrieve all the detail. The following will help you search within the text. The advanced search boxes sometimes help you combine a specific full text search with a broader subject search.
Provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites.
Provides access to scholarly journals in the arts and sciences. Contains a digital library of images, previously known as ARTStor, in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences with a set of tools to view, present, and manage images.
Provides full-text access to scholarly journals from the Johns Hopkins University Press and other University presses covering the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Mathematics.
Keep an eye on the citations and bibliographies in sources that you find. You are joining a conversation that has been going on for some time. With their citations authors are introducing you to fellow explorers. If you want to find a specific article or book, use these links:
Find a specific article
Find a specific book
If we don't have the specific thing you're looking for, these links will guide you to request a copy from another library. We can usually deliver things within a couple of days (sometimes faster) at no cost to you.
As apprentice scholars, you'll also find it helpful and interesting to see how more experienced researchers use other sources. You may notice patterns in which journals or book publishers are covering topics you're interested in. You can also see how people use primary sources from earlier times, sort of like having a guide to time-travel. Often there are forms of publication earlier that no longer exist today.
