STEM Librarian / Research Help
Welcome to the FYSP 006 Research Guide
This guide is designed to kickstart student research in FYSP 006 Power, Politics, and Pastries by highlighting key resources, databases, and strategies that will be useful for your work in this class.
Search Strategy
Here is a good, basic formula for getting started with your research:
- Begin by narrowing down your topic and developing an initial research question.
- Use the keyword brainstorming worksheet to help you tweak your research question, identify keywords and related terms, and keep track of what you find.
- Use Search.Libraries on the OC Libraries web page to find books and reference sources. These sources will:
- provide BACKGROUND and CONTEXT
- REVIEW and SUMMARIZE earlier work
- help you FOCUS your topic and
- provide CITATIONS to important books, journal articles, conference papers, interviews, etc.
- Next, search research databases to find articles. The library has hundreds of databases; those listed on this guide are good places to begin.
- You may also wish to use Google Scholar to search the Internet. This is a great tool for doing cited reference searches.
Key Resources
The following are some best bets for starting Food Studies research. For a full list of databases at Oberlin, check out our Databases A-Z.
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Bloomsbury Cultural History This link opens in a new window
Authoritative survey of cultural history topics. Each subject is looked at in Antiquity, the Medieval Age, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Age of Empire and the Modern Age and thematic coverage is consistent across all periods so that users can either gain a broad overview of a period or follow a theme through the ages.
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Bloomsbury Food Studies This link opens in a new windowBloomsbury Food Library offers cross-searchable access to a broad and expanding range of encyclopedias, references works, e-books, images, podcasts, and more.
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Food Studies Online This link opens in a new windowCollection of archival content, visual ephemera, books, and videos that explore how food shapes the world around us. Key themes and disciplines with extensive coverage represented include: marketing and consumerism, production and technology, food history, food movements, culinary and food design, food and identity, health, policy, religion, sociology, anthropology, and history. (Coverage dates: 1900-present)
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Web of Science This link opens in a new window
Scholarly literature in the sciences, health and medicine, social sciences, arts, and humanities and proceedings of international conferences, symposia, seminars, colloquia, workshops, and conventions. Includes cited reference searching across many databases. Search all databases in Web of Science (includes Medline and BIOSIS, direct link for on-campus users). Dates of coverage: 1965 to present.
