Your course textbook . Textbooks have bibliographies , which can suggest topics for further exploration or different viewpoints on topics covered in the text. A general encyclopedia covers the entire range of human knowledge in brief. A search using your basic topic concept retrieves every mention of that concept in the encyclopedia, showing you different contexts for the topic and some of the fields of study that have explored it.
Subject encyclopedias cover the range of knowledge within a single discipline .
A search here can familiarize you with some of the different contexts within which your topic has been discussed in a discipline . Periodical indexes . A topic or key word search in a general periodical database retrieves articles from magazines and journals that include your topic. This will give you a chance to see what's being written on your topic in magazines like Time, Ms. , or Scientific American , and journals like Communication Quarterly or Harvard Law Review .