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HIS 3786 Nation, City, and Identity in China

Search Strategies and Chicago Style Information for the Research Proposal

An important acknowledgement

Though I will be making changes over time, some of the material on this course guide was created originally by my predecessor in History, the inimitable Adrienne Meier.

What's In This Guide

Before You Begin Searching                        Finding Articles                                       Citing in Chicago Style

Note on Chinese Names                                          Places to Start                                        RefWorks

Finding Books                                                                       Scholarly Articles                                  Chicago Style Basics

Where's the Book?                                                   Where's the Full Text?                            Chicago Style: Notes

Summit                                                                        Thesaurus                                                Chicago Style: Bibliography

Subject Headings                                                      Database Tools                                      Chicago Style Resources

Is the Book Useful?

Need Help?

Talk to your librarian, Adrienne Meier!

Her contact information is in the box on the left.

Before You Begin Searching

Think about how you would describe your topic (or perhaps what terms you are going to use in your research question). Then search for those terms along with words like "China," "urban," and "history."

The catalog and most databases have an "Advanced Search" option which allows you to put in multiple terms at the beginning of your search, and to use other helpful tools to get a better results list.

Note on Chinese Names

The spellings of Chinese city names can vary because there are different ways of rendering names originally in Chinese characters into English. This process is called Romanization. An example is the name of China's capital city, which used to be rendered "Peking" but is now rendered "Beijing."

Databases will often have a preferred Romanization, which can be found in the database's thesaurus. Often, the preferred Romanization will give you all the articles in the database, but if you see other Romanizations in your results list, try searching for them as well.