Libraries

Today's hours:

Ask a Librarian
FAQ

We are excited to share our new Library catalog and search tool! We hope that you will find it easy to search and explore our collections. If you need help, have questions, or want to share feedback, visit the Ask a Librarian page.

Ask a Librarian

Need help with your research? Ask a Librarian!

Contact the librarian for your subject area/department/program
Email your question to researchhelp@vassar.edu
Request a research consultation with a librarian
Chat online with us (Monday-Friday, 10 AM-4 PM)
Make an appointment with Archives & Special Collections

Reference sources

Reference sources, including encyclopedias and handbooks, can help expand your understanding of key terms and concepts related to your research topic. Many of these resources also contain recommendations for further reading and more in-depth study.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Find books and more with the catalog and Discover

Are you looking for books?

Start with the Vassar Libraries catalog
Click on the location (Main) to see a map and find the book in the stacks
Click on the call number (B126 .Z46237 2016 ) to see what books are located nearby (call numbers group information together by subject/topic)
Click on a subject heading (Philosophy, Chinese) to find other books on this subject

Are you looking for books and articles?

Try Discover. It searches the Vassar catalog, as well as many of our resources for scholarly articles.
You'll often get a lot of search results in Discover. Use the options in the left sidebar to set limits and find the most relevant sources for your topic.
Choose the content type that best meets your research need.
Select one or more disciplines if you're finding too many sources from less-relevant areas of scholarship.
You can also limit to a range of publication years or by language.

Find articles and more in your subject area with databases

As a Vassar researcher, you have access to hundreds of databases. We have databases that contain different types of materials (scholarly articles, newspapers, images, primary sources, audio and video...), as well as databases that are especially appropriate for particular subject areas (philosophy, Asian studies, history...). When choosing a database, try to match where you search to what you hope to find. Here are some examples of databases that may be useful for your annotated bibliography.

JSTOR
JSTOR has journals from many different subject areas, and is a great database to use when you're starting your research. It can help you get a sense of the scholarship that exists on your topic, and the perspectives that scholars from a variety of fields have brought to your area of interest.
PhilPapers.org
PhilPapers is a specialized database that focuses on sources in philosophy including articles, books, conference papers, academics' personal web pages, and more. This resource will help you hone in on the scholarly conversation within the discipline of philosophy. If JSTOR allows you to see "what scholars say" about your topic, you can think of PhilPapers as revealing "what scholars of philosophy say" about your topic - so you're getting more focused in your research and exploration.
Bibliography of Asian Studies
This resource contains scholarship from a variety of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, focusing on East, Southeast, and South Asia. If you've gone from general (JSTOR) to specific (PhilPapers) in your search for sources, Bibliography of Asian Studies will help you apply a multidisciplinary lens to your topic.

Citation tracing

You've found a great book on your topic, but you're struggling to find other sources. Try citation tracing to identify additional relevant books and articles. This sounds fancy and complicated, but it's as simple as checking out the bibliography and/or notes in a source you've already found, and using these citations to expand your search.

You have a citation to a book: check the Vassar catalog
You have a citation to a book chapter: check the Vassar catalog or Discover
You have a citation to an article: check Discover (search for the title of the article) or our journals page (search for the title of the journal)
If we don't have what you need here at Vassar, you can request books, book chapters, and journal articles through Interlibrary Loan (ILL)
If you're looking at a citation and unsure of how to interpret it, or if you could use some help with locating or requesting sources, just Ask a Librarian!