Guides: How Do I Find ~ Research Starting Points: Home

In person:
Research & Design Studio hours

Call us:
315-859-4735

Email us:
askus@hamilton.edu

Make an appointment:
request form

Topic Selection

Topic Selection

This tutorial explains how to take a broad topic and narrow it down to something manageable for your research. It explains how to do this with a concept map, research pyramid, and brainstorm cloud.

Approximate Time: 6 - 8 minutes

Leads: Glynis Asu (Hamilton College), Jesi Buell & Debbie Krahmer (Colgate University), Lindsay Bush (Union College), Paul Doty (St. Lawrence University), and Johanna MacKay & Barbara Norelli (Skidmore College).

Search Everything

Search Multidisciplinary Databases

Academic Search Premier This link opens in a new window
Index of nearly 8,000 scholarly journals and popular magazines in all areas of study. Includes the full text for more than 4,600 titles. Coverage varies by publication.
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Full text of leading academic journals from the humanities, social sciences, and sciences dating back as far as 1665. Hamilton provides access to 17 JSTOR collections with more than 2,300 titles. Journal runs are complete from volume one up to the most recently published issues (past 5 years), which must be accessed elsewhere.
Library owns:
Arts & Sciences collections I-XV
Business
Life Sciences collection
Security Studies collection
Sustainability collection
Nexis Uni This link opens in a new window
More than 11,000 news, business and legal sources from LexisNexis®—including U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1790.
Search FAQ
How to Find a Legal Case
Video: Searching from the Home Page
Video: Source Selection & Creating Permalinks
Video: Creating Alerts
Web of Science This link opens in a new window
Index of articles from over 10,000 journals in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. In addition to multidisciplinary searches, Web of Science provides tools to track citations to individual articles from their date of publication to the present. Now includes Book Citation Index and Conference Proceedings Citation Index. Coverage: 1900-present.
Web of Science Intro
Videos
WorldCat This link opens in a new window
Catalog of books, periodicals, videos, and other materials from more than 72,000 libraries worldwide. Most items are available through interlibrary loan and arrive in less than 2 weeks.