SEARCHING FOR THE "BEST" BOOKS:

Using the WRLC Aladin databases to identify the "best" scholarly books on your topic.

1)  For help in more effectively using the WRLC catalogue, go to the main WRLC page and click on "Help" and then on "Searching the Catalogue."

2)  Once you have identified a book on your topic, use the cross references ("Subjects")  to identify other books on the same or similar topics.

Some rules of thumb in searching for the "best" book:

1) When was it published?  A more recently published book may not always be better, but the author usually has the advantage of a) being able to read what has already been published by other historians; and b) often has access to documents and other materials that may not have been available earlier.

2)  Who published it?  A prestigious academic press (say, the University of Chicago Press) is more likely to publish a quality scholarly book than a mainstream publisher aiming at the mass market, a marginal publishing house, or a "vanity press" that publishes books subsidized by the author.

3)  What audience is it written for?  You are looking for a book aimed at an audience of scholars.  This usually means that it will include the scholarly apparatus of footnotes, bibliography, etc.

4)  What do other scholars say about it?  Is it listed prominently in the bibliographies of other books on the topic?  Use some of the libraries databases to search for reviews.  Two of the largest and most inclusive search engines are Academic Search Premier (EBESCO) and Proquest General.   JSTOR includes full text articles and reviews from the leading journals in History, Political Science and a number of other major disciplines.   America: History and Life has been greatly expanded with "find it" links to many online sources and/or to the WRLC catalogue.   Project Muse includes a somewhat wider array of more specialized journals, but only for the past five or six years.  The classic source for book reviews is Book Review Digest, now available on line through OCLC's First Search database, which also includes other book reviews. Often times you can locate a review through OCLC and then locate the review itself on one of the Library's other databases, JSTOR, Project Muse, etc.  Other potential sources of information include Academic Universe (Lexis-Nexis), though it focuses primarily on recently published materials..

As a general rule, the best articles will appear in scholarly journals.  The most prominent of these journals are included in the databases listed above will again be useful: JSTOR ,  Project Muse, Proquest General, OCLC, Academic Universe (Lexis-Nexis) and especially, the new and expanded  America: History and Life. See also the Social Science Citation Index (and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index), which are available online for the past five to six years.  (For earlier years, consult the bound volumes in the Reference area of the Library.) These last two references are especially useful, as they allow you to see how widely cited a book or article is by other authors.  Notoriety, of course, is not an infallible guide; some authors may be citing a work in order to criticize it.

Often times you can identify important articles by way of the bibliography and footnotes of important books.  (So, for example, you may be able to discover important articles by combing through the "best" book you identified for the first part of this assignment.  You may then cross reference the article against the above listed databases, including the Social Science Citation Index, the Arts and Humanities Index.)

Warning: History is a very large, diverse and specialized discipline.  There are literally hundreds of journals, including many that are NOT included in the main databases.  If, for example, you are exploring a very specialized topic, you will not want to limit your search to these large but nevertheless limited databases.