For college-level research, you’ll need to go beyond reference sources (like the Encyclopedia Britannica or Wikipedia) and track down credible, academic sources like books, government documents, or journal articles. While you can’t use Wikipedia itself as a source (and you certainly can’t cite it), you can use Wikipedia as a starting place to get background information, basic concepts, and links to related or additional reference material on a topic.
Doing Detective Work
When you find citations for books, articles, documents, or websites through Wikipedia (or in any bibliography), write down the title of the book or the ISBN number, or the name of the magazine or journal that an article was published in. If the source isn’t openly available on the Web, you can check the library to see if we have the material.
Then enter the book title or ISBN in the library’s Discovery Search box to see if we have it. If a book isn’t available in the VSC library system, request a copy through Interlibrary Loan.
Type the article title into the library’s Discovery Search box to see if we have it in a database – you may need to add the author’s name or part of the publication name too. If it isn’t available, you can request the article through Interlibrary Loan.
Instead of citing Wikipedia as your image source, you can Google your way to the museum or academic repository that houses that work of art or artifact. Enter the name of the painting, sculpture, or piece of art into a Google search along with the author’s name, country, or even the materials that it is made out of.
That increases your chances of finding the image at a museum website or academic repository, and those are much better sources to cite in academic work.
