Dr. Kenneth Wald
You must submit a list of ten sources
you anticipate using for the paper on Tuesday, March 22nd. As noted
in the assignment page, at least five of these must be academic
works--articles in scholarly journals, academic books (not assigned as
class reading), feature articles in serious magazines (
New York Times Magazine,
Harpers, New Yorker, Atlantic but not
U.S.
News, Time and others of that ilk.)
I will be happy to meet with you in office hours to
discuss good sources. I will also suggest other UF faculty who you
should visit to help compile a bibliography. Beyond that, here is some
guidance.
In finding sources, you need to exercise a great deal of caution about
using the Web. When I refer to web sources, I
don't mean journal, newspaper, and
magazine articles which are originally published in hard copy and then
stored as online archives. Those can generally be assessed. Nor do I
mean to discourage you from using web sites that are clearly relevant
to your paper. For example, if you were writing about a problem that
required you to access the web site of the American Jewish Committee,
that would be perfectly acceptable. However, when you use a website
from an organization, be aware that it is primary material and has not
been vetted for accuracy or quality. Under no circumstances should you
cite Wikipedia as a source. You may use it to identify other sources
but go to those sources directly. While it's difficult to draw a
hard and fast rule, web sources cannot be assumed to be authoritative
or accurate. I recommend two sources for evaluating web sites:
The Good, the Bad and
the Ugly and
Evaluating
Web
Sites.
One obvious place to look for
sources is the online book catalog of the UF Library. You should also
use the various databases to find journal articles. There are two that
I highly recommend but you may find others appropriate to your subject:
EBSCO:
This is a basic source for searching for articles in the social
sciences and humanities. To use EBSCO, you must be on the UF network
directly or connect using a proxy server. To get to EBSC, go the
main UF library page, click on
the "Databases" tab at the top of the page, click on "Program
Starters," and then click on "Academic Search Premier. It will save you
a lot of time to limit your
search to Scholarly (peer-reviewed) Journals, Documents that are
articles, and sources in English. Do not click on "Full Text Articles"
only because you'll miss good stuff that way. The real trick is
finding keywords that address your topic
without being either too limited or too broad. Use common sense and
trial and error. You may search by author name, title word, subject,
and other fields. Once you have your selection, hit the "Search"
Button and see what comes up. As you will see, you may be able to find
the material at UF.
RAMBI: RAMBI is a
specialized database for Jewish Studies and includes both journal
articles and book chapters. (You don't need to be connected to the UF
network to access it.) When you get to the home page and have read the
the search information, click on the link
for "RAMBI Web" and then the tab for "Advanced Search." You have
some options for the fields you search and can also ask for only items
in English, which I recommend. RAMBI also offers opportunities to save
and download references but is not directly linked to the UF.
Another very useful place to look is the guide to the
UF Judaica Library.
The librarian, Rebecca Jefferson (whose contact information is on the
website I just gave you), can be very helpful and I urge you to contact
her.