Reference works are a good place to start research when you need an overview of a topic.  Articles in reference works often give a history of a topic, provide facts and statistics, key players, and a list of further readings.

Reading a reference article can give you ideas for narrowing or broadening your topic, and also for search terms to use in subsequent web, book, or article searches.

The reference works listed to the right are only a small selection of our available sources.  Look in the library catalog and do an advanced search to limit to Reference Sources.