Tutorial: Research Guide: Theology
Channel: CSB/SJU Libraries
Date: 2019-12-06

Suppose you want to get started researching a topic using library resources and don’t know where to start.  We’ve created a number of Research Guides designed to be starting points for research in the various disciplines.  This video shows you how to find and get started using the Theology Research Guide.

• First, go to the library website: https://www.csbsju.edu/libraries - you can find this using the “Tools” menu on the main campus website.

• Click “Research Guide” and choose theology as the subject, select the “Theology” guide

• One of the common things people want to do is locate scholarly articles – we have a couple of recommended databases on the main guide page – scroll down and you’ll see both Atla and ProQuest Religion listed in the “Recommended Databases” section

• For this example, we’ll use ATLA.  Let’s say you have a twelve-page research paper for Social Ethics class. You choose a topic on the care for creation. Type: “Ecotheology”

• As you can see there are 1,095 results-that’s a lot. Remember, this isn’t Google - don’t go through the results right away.  Let’s filter our research with some other criteria

• On the left side, let’s limit to Scholarly (Peer Reviewed) Journals, and let’s set the publication date for the last 10 years 

• Let’s change the source type to academic journals 

• Now, there are 354 results (a significant reduction)

• Let’s add another term – think of a word that would certainly be in an article you’re looking for – in this case, if we add the word “climate” anywhere in the text: 81 results 

• Choose the title: “Christianity and the climate crisis…” as an example, if this looks good, click the title – explore the record, you can view additional subject headings, see that this is from the journal Feminist Theology, and if it has “PDF full text” you can click that to get a copy of the article.

• You have some choices to download, print, email etc.

• Please don’t forget to record the citation, either by using the buildt-in cite feature or by exporting the citation to EndNote or other bibliography manager software.

• normally, Chicago/Turabian is the format for doing work in theology at Saint John’s.

(show the Research Guide for Theology again)

• There are a lot of resources linked from the Theology Research Guide

• Contact the librarian if you need additional help.

• Thank you for watching this library tutorial.  Please visit our website for more information.