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. 

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. 

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.

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!