History Course Guides: History 440/550 Silk Road
History 440/550
University Library PAGE Is the place to start. It contains an overview of library research services available.
FINDING SCHOLARLY BOOKS IN ONESEARCH
- OneSearch Search Techniques
- If you are looking for a phrase "silk road" put your terms in quotation marks. It will force word adjacency.
- If you want word variants, use an asterisk* at the end of a word. Entering "trade route*" will produce "trade route" OR "trade routes"
- If you want synonyms, put similar terms in parenthesis and use capital OR. (silk OR cloth OR spices OR goods)
- To get results with higher relevancy to you topic, in this hyperlink, enter subject keyword searches. These may produce results with higher relevancy to your search
Here is a list of books we have that might pertain to this topic.
- Option1: "silk road"
- Option 2: (medieval OR "middle ages" OR spice OR silk) and "trade route*"
BOOK AND JOURNAL LOANING OPTIONS FROM OTHER LIBRARIES
- CSU+ To rapidly get books that we don't have, (within 2-4 days) from other CSU libraries.
- BEACH REACH Use to get journal articles we don't own delivered rapidly to your desktop.
FINDING PRIMARY HISTORICAL CONTENT IN ONESEARCH
Here is a list of a few books that might have primary content, including modern documentaries on medieval trade routes or silk road.
- Try combining the subject keywords below with the phrase "silk road" to find content with emphasis on material culture, visuals
architect* art* film* cinema motion picture* painting* sculpture* clothing costum* dress material culture furniture artifact* pictorial photograph*
Here is Another method to find primary accounts: Find old travel journeys or narratives.
- Pan around map on this page (don't need to purchase) to identify a major city along the Silk Road. Then take your city name and combine it with subject journey* OR voyage* OR travel*
- See this example: Samarkand and journey* OR voyage OR travel*
Research Databases Red dates indicate primary source option
To find articles in many of our databases, look for the SFX icon in each citation. It may look like this 
It’s a shortcut to finding the article online.
- Academic Search Complete Accesses nearly 6000 full text interdisciplinary journals. Coverage: 1990 to date.
- Anthropology Plus. Worldwide archaeological and anthropological research.
- ARTstor 1000 BC to Present A digital library of more than one million images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and social sciences.
- Brepolis Medieval Bibliographies Covers the historical period from 300-1500 AD. Europe, the Mideast and North Africa are the database’s focus. Indexes journal articles, books & conference proceedings.
- Collections Search Center 1000 BC to Present. Find millions of artifacts in massive Smithsonian collections nationwide.
- Getty Images. 1000 BC to Present. Contains thousands of journalistic and artistic images that can be viewed for free. Select "editorial" image option. Great for primary visual sources
- Historical Abstracts (for World History). These are the two premier scholarly periodical indexes for historical content published since the mid 1950s. Both databases may be searched simultaneously. See this example..
- JSTOR Journal Archive An archive of core scholarly full text journals going back to the 1800s. Contains selected journals in the social sciences and humanities.
- L’Année Philologique 500 BCE -500 CE Greek and Roman Antiquity
- Project Muse Contains over 200 full text, scholarly, frequently used journals in the humanities and social sciences journals from the 1960s to date.
FINDING Museum artifacts,
ArchivesGrid includes over 4 million records describing archival materials, historical documents, personal papers, family histories, from over 1000 different archives.
Citing Historical Materials
- See our library's citation help page.
- CSULB's Department of History uses the Chicago/Turabian Notes & Bibliography Style
Google tips and techniques
to find specific sites at types of domains, and websites based in other countries:
site:edu (to find sites located at colleges, universities)
site:org (to find sites at nonprofit organizations)
site:gov (to find government sites, government documents)
site:ru (stands for Russia. Use two letter country codes for domains in a country.
- Use Google Scholar to find wide array of scholarly journal articles.
- Use Google Books to find research snippets in scanned books. If the book reads PREVIEW you are in luck! You may be able to read 20% of the book, and maybe entire chapter.