Course Number: RE407
Subject: Religion and Culture
Scholarly sources
In general, when looking for scholarly sources, you will be consulting and citing three formats:
journal article
Steen, Sheldon. “The Blair Martyr Project: The Passion of Perpetua and Found Footage Horror.” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 31, no. 3 (Fall 2019): 183–95. doi:10.3138/jrpc.2017-0064.
book
Daniels, Timothy P. Living Sharia Law and Practice in Malaysia. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017.
book chapter
Bernice, Carol. "How Queer is Celibacy?: a Queer Nun's Story." in Queer Christianities: Lived Religion in Transgressive Forms, edited by Kathleen T. Talvacchia, Mark Larrimore, and Michael F. Pettinger, 48-52. New York: New York University, 2015.
- Tutorial: Finding an article when you only know the title
- Tutorial: How can I tell if my source is scholarly?
- Tutorial: How do find scholarly books
- Tutorial: Doing a literature review
Other sources
reference source
Mansager, E. (2022). Spirituality. In: Glăveanu, V.P. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
magazine article
Addario, Lynsey, and Leila Fadel. Being Muslim in America. National Geographic Magazine. Vol. 233. Washington: National Geographic Partners, 2018.
newspaper article
Hogben, Alia. "The Mixing of Religion and Politics can Become Problematic." Kingston Whig - Standard, A7. Sep 23, 2023.
letter to the editor
Letter to the editor. "Religion Shouldn't be Forced on Students." Nanaimo News Bulletin, Dec 12, 2019.
editorial
Milloy, John. "Religion can Help Bring Us Together." Waterloo Region Record, A9. May 03, 2023.
primary source
Abdel Haleem, M. A., trans. The Qurʼan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
video
Harmoni: Healing Together. London, England: Royal Anthropological Institute, 2021.
thesis
Sengupta, A. (2023). An exploration of spirituality and empowerment in fortune 500 companies: A qualitative study of women leaders in the united states (see page 20)
Library databases; search tips
Regardless of what you are searching for, or which tools you use, keep in mind the following tips (although be aware that not all databases support each of these options)
- Tutorial: Developing a research question
- Consider word variations and synonyms
- think about how others might refer to your ideas
- e.g, death rituals --> death OR dying OR funeral OR mortuary
- Tutorial: Using search words effectively
Search Tactics
What is the tactic? | What does the tactic do? | Examples |
---|---|---|
Boolean AND | Use AND to ensure that all terms appear in every search result. | heterodox AND gnostic |
Boolean OR | Use OR to ensure that at least one term appears in every search result. Tutorial: Better searching using AND, OR, NOT | indigenous OR aboriginal |
Phrase searching | Use “quotation marks” to find more than one term in a row. | “islamic law” |
Truncation | Use an asterisk* at the end of a term to include multiple endings. (sometimes $) Tutorial: Better searching using truncation | religio* religion, religions, religious, religiosity, religousness |
Wildcard | Use a question mark ? within a term to search for variations of a single character. | decoloni?e decolonize, decolonise |
Proximity | Use NEAR/n to search for terms within n words of each other
| "music therapy" NEAR/5 child* OR adolescent* |
- Employ search limiters (available limiters depend on the database)
- peer reviewed, article type, date
- Identify key publications and authors
- note citations, and cited references, repeated author names
- Document and track everything you do in the steps above
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Books
Tutorial: Finding books in Omni
Tutorial: Requesting books from other libraries in Omni
- start with Omni
- limit to "Books and eBooks", e.g, "islamic law" sharia malaysia
- use call number (e.g. to find location of Laurier's print items)
- sign in to request from other Omni libraries
- use Scan on Demand for chapters or articles
note about ebooks
While Omni contains a catalogue record (author, title, etc.) of our eBooks, an Omni search does not search the full text of each book. Instead, you need to visit and search the various sites where our eBooks are stored. Some examples include:
Articles
Tutorial: Finding scholarly articles on a topic
- start with Omni
- limit to "Articles" and "Peer-reviewed journals"
- while you will likely find some relevant material on your topic, article content in Omni is not chosen or curated based on subject, but dumped in, i.e., it may not have everything on a particular topic, or your result list might be too large to parse.
- Researchers rely on curated collections of content according to discipline. Some of the helpful databases for the topics in this course include:
- The library has over 400 different databases that you could consider.
- Ask me, I might have come across some relevant resources.
More research materials
Research -> More research materials
Grey literature
Grey literature is information produced outside traditional scholarly publications. It includes reports, policy briefs and reports, major research papers, white papers, working papers, government documents, speeches, etc.
There is no single database that covers grey literature well, so Google is helpful in cases like this. Consider the following tips when searching Google, often using these in combination:
- limit to domain
- site:ca, site:edu
- limit to document type
- filetype:pdf, filetype:pptx
- think how a document might phrase something, enclose that in quotes