If you want to identify important themes, research, and methods in an area of research unfamiliar to you, a great way to get started is to pick up an anthology, handbook, or companion. Such books pull together essays from recognized experts in their research areas along with summaries by the editors putting the works of those experts into conversation. Through the collected works themselves and the works they site in their bibliographies, you can use these texts to quickly get familiar with an area of research new to you.

Try this search strategy in Catalyst, Carleton and St. Olaf's catalog of library materials.

Never fear. This is a little complicated, but once you have done it one time, you'll be set.

First, go to the Advanced Search in Catalyst.

In the first box, enter a word or two with really broad concepts, for example, if you are interested in households headed by single mothers, just start with the concept of family (for another example, try example: refugee*). Leave the default values for Any field and contains.

Any field  /  contains  /  family OR families 

In the second box, leave the defaults and enter the following terms which are used in the titles of the kinds of books we're looking for. 

Any field  /  contains  /  reader OR anthology OR companion OR handbook

(Tip: if you don't like typing, just copy my string of words above and paste into Catalyst)

Finally, limit by publishers likely to publish this type of work. Here's where the real power of Catalyst comes in. Click the option to "Add a new line"

In your new line to the search, click on Any field then scroll down until you find Publisher, 

then enter:

Publisher  /  contains  /  blackwell OR university OR routledge OR sage 

See this search and the results in Catalyst!