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Research Seminar

Course Number: RE407

Subject: Religion and Culture

Scholarly sources

In general, when looking for scholarly sources, you will be consulting and citing three formats:

journal article

Steen, Sheldon. “The Blair Martyr Project: The Passion of Perpetua and Found Footage Horror.” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 31, no. 3 (Fall 2019): 183–95. doi:10.3138/jrpc.2017-0064.

book

Daniels, Timothy P. Living Sharia Law and Practice in Malaysia. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017.

book chapter

Bernice, Carol. "How Queer is Celibacy?: a Queer Nun's Story." in Queer Christianities: Lived Religion in Transgressive Forms, edited by Kathleen T. Talvacchia, Mark Larrimore, and Michael F. Pettinger, 48-52. New York: New York University, 2015. 

Other sources

reference source

Mansager, E. (2022). Spirituality. In: Glăveanu, V.P. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

magazine article

Addario, Lynsey, and Leila Fadel. Being Muslim in America. National Geographic Magazine. Vol. 233. Washington: National Geographic Partners, 2018.

newspaper article

Hogben, Alia. "The Mixing of Religion and Politics can Become Problematic." Kingston Whig - Standard, A7. Sep 23, 2023.

letter to the editor

Letter to the editor. "Religion Shouldn't be Forced on Students." Nanaimo News Bulletin, Dec 12, 2019.

editorial

Milloy, John. "Religion can Help Bring Us Together." Waterloo Region Record, A9. May 03, 2023.

primary source

Abdel Haleem, M. A., trans. The Qurʼan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

video

Harmoni: Healing Together. London, England: Royal Anthropological Institute, 2021.

thesis

Sengupta, A. (2023). An exploration of spirituality and empowerment in fortune 500 companies: A qualitative study of women leaders in the united states  (see page 20)

Library databases; search tips

Regardless of what you are searching for, or which tools you use, keep in mind the following tips (although be aware that not all databases support each of these options)

  1. Tutorial: Developing a research question
  2. Consider word variations and synonyms
Search Tactics

What is the tactic?

What does the tactic do?

Examples

Boolean AND

Use AND to ensure that all terms appear in every search result.

heterodox AND gnostic

Boolean OR

Use OR to ensure that at least one term appears in every search result.

Tutorial: Better searching using AND, OR, NOT

indigenous OR aboriginal

Phrase searching

Use quotation marks to find more than one term in a row.

islamic law

Truncation

Use an asterisk* at the end of a term to include multiple endings. (sometimes $)

Tutorial: Better searching using truncation

religio*

religion, religions, religious, religiosity, religousness

Wildcard

Use a question mark ? within a term to search for variations of a single character.

decoloni?e

decolonize, decolonise

Proximity

Use NEAR/n to search for terms within n words of each other

  • (sometimes ADJ/n)
  • only useful in full text databases

"music therapy" NEAR/5 child* OR adolescent*

  1. Employ search limiters (available limiters depend on the database)
    • peer reviewed, article type, date
  2. Identify key publications and authors
    • note citations, and cited references, repeated author names
  3. Document and track everything you do in the steps above

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Books

Tutorial: Finding books in Omni
Tutorial: Requesting books from other libraries in Omni

note about ebooks

While Omni contains a catalogue record (author, title, etc.) of our eBooks, an Omni search does not search the full text of each book. Instead, you need to visit and search the various sites where our eBooks are stored. Some examples include:

Articles

Tutorial: Finding scholarly articles on a topic

More research materials
Grey literature

Grey literature is information produced outside traditional scholarly publications. It includes reports, policy briefs and reports, major research papers, white papers, working papers, government documents, speeches, etc. 

There is no single database that covers grey literature well, so Google is helpful in cases like this. Consider the following tips when searching Google, often using these in combination: