Reference sources such as encyclopedias are a great source of background information about a topic, they point you to other scholarly material, and can provide additional keywords to further your research.

Using the Catalyst search box above, you can do a simple keyword search for your topic and narrow down your results to "reference entries" on the left hand side, after you have run a search. This will allow you to discover  reference articles by name and the encyclopedias where those can be found.

Begin your research with reference works to find background information, definitions, locate statistics and facts, and build a bibliography.