PSC 492: How to Search for Books

Physical and Electronic Books

You can search the entire library catalog for physical and electronic books all at once through OneSearch.

OneSearch can be accessed at the Marx Library homepage.

Before you submit your search, please look at the checkboxes below the search bar.

• Full Text means that every search return will have the full item available to access.
• Peer Reviewed means that every search return item will have gone through the peer review process. This sometimes happens for books/monographs, but it is uncommon. A monograph can be high quality without being peer-reviewed before publication.

Once you submit a search, you can see the search results page.

I have not told the search engine to limit my results to only show books yet. (Monographs would count as books.) I can limit my source type by selecting Books and/or eBooks.

I searched with only one term: Latin America. That term is extremely broad. I had 12,833 results from my search. This will be very hard to scroll through.

I can do an advanced search with two (or three or more) terms being searched at once.

Books can be scholarly works. You can evaluate the quality of a scholarly work to check that is appropriate for your research. Not every book will have a book review, but they can be helpful to understand the book's contents and quality.

• Authorship - Authors should have expertise and authority in the subject. This can be shown by:
  • A doctoral degree in the discipline. Most authors you can search online to see their educational background.
  • An association with an educational institution like a University or a research organization.
• Publisher - The publisher should be academic. This can be an academic press or society.
• Proof of research - Books should always have a list of resources the author consulted. These can we called "works cited" or "bibliography". These works might be listed at the end of each chapter or at the end of the entire book.
• Reviews - A scholarly book might have book reviews. These book reviews would be written by other scholars and published in academic journals. You can find book reviews by searching databases like Academic Search Complete with the book's title.

To find a physical book, you will need the book's Library of Congress call number. The call number tells you where the book is positioned in the library.

When you search OneSearch, and find an interesting book, you can look at the attached record to see if the book is available and what the Call number is.

The call number starts with F. Our bookshelves are labeled with what letter and range of numbers are contained on that row of shelves.

When you find one book that fits your research interests, you can also browse for other physical books in that same area. They will have the same or similar topics!