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Boatwright Memorial Library

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Nick Dease
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Boatwright Library, Rm. 185
261 Richmond Way
University of Richmond, VA 23173
804-289-8453

FYS 100 Civic Journalism and Social Justice (Mullen)

Library Research Guide for Professor Mullen's FYS

Where to Start Searching:

OneSearch is the library catalog, there you can search almost everything in the library at once- books, media, news sources, scholarly journals, and more.

Library databases are smaller collections of scholarly articles, news sources, images, media and more, which may be organized thematically on different topics.

Google Scholar - a resource for both scholarly and non-scholarly articles. If you are on campus, you will find links to scholarly articles in our databases.

Search Tips:

  • Brainstorm a few key words or phrases to help get you started. These could be people, places, or topics.
  • Decide what types of resources you are looking for (books, chapters, scholarly articles, news, etc.) and use the appropriate filters.
  • Limit your search to scholarly or peer-reviewed work if desired using the filters.
  • Look at the library's other research guides on different topics and types of sources including the news, journalismRichmond, and polls, data and statistics guides.
  • If you can't find an article or book you need, check out our service called interlibrary loan - we can request materials from other libraries if we don't have them at UR

Find News Sources

(Look up articles about Richmond's Confederate monuments)

Find Scholarly Articles

Scholarly articles can help us provide more context to our journalistic research. Maybe we need a sociological study about income inequality or a medical journal article to talk about the pandemic for instance. What do we mean when we say "scholarly sources"? 

Scholarly writing or academic scholarship tends to come from people (like your professors) producing knowledge and engaging in conversation with fellow scholars in their field.

Find Photos and Images

(Look up images of Confederate monuments)

Reference Sources

In the beginning of your research, it's helpful to learn just enough about the topic to get a basic overview. When we start out, we don't know enough yet to really dive into the details so we often turn to Wikipedia. We can gain a lot of information from encyclopedias, dictionaries, and short biographical profiles (which we call reference sources), before turning to lengthier books and scholarly articles. You can find our reference resources listed on our databases page, or by searching the library catalog Onesearch using the filter for "reference entries".