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Emory Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program

Reference Materials

What are reference sources?

Reference sources are works that help you locate information about people, facts, and ideas. These sources can help you find the date of an important event, major achievements of an individual or organization, or a definition of a term or concept. They are sometimes called tertiary sources.

Examples include:
Dictionaries/encyclopedias (may also be secondary), almanacs, fact books, Wikipedia, bibliographies (may also be secondary), directories, guidebooks, manuals, handbooks, and textbooks (may be secondary), indexing and abstracting sources.

Handbooks & Companions

To find companions, handbooks, or bibliographies you can search the catalog; however, individual articles can be hard to find. Also try searching the portals to these resources below.

Oxford Bibliographies, annotated bibliographies that provide a gateway to research in particular subfields.

Cambridge Companions, guides to various topics.

Rutledge Handbooks, book-length companions to various topics.

Oxford Handbooks, reviews of scholarly literature.

Annual Reviews Online, reviews of scholarly literature in the sciences and social sciences. 

Finding Biographical Information

What is a biography?

Biographical entries in encyclopedias are one example of a tertiary source. You can find such entries on the open web, in library databases, and in print encyclopedias. You can also find book-length biographies in the library catalog. Here are some places you can search for biographical encyclopedia entries:

Recommended Encyclopedias

For a list of recommended titles check out a research guide in your field.