Research Guides: AGRI116: Plants and Civilizations: Starting your search

Selecting keywords from your topic

You'll need to know your keywords to start looking for background information on your topic and, later, to start looking for articles and books in the library's databases.

E-Resources to Help Find Your Topic

As you begin your research process, you will need to get acquainted with your topic. The following list offers resources that will help you get acquainted with your plant. Kind of like searching in Wikipedia, but better.

Use them to learn more and get a better understanding before doing your in-depth research. These resources are for background information; DON'T cite them in your paper.

Plant Sciences
This encyclopedia on plant science contains 280 entries of with numerous photos, tables, boxes, and sidebars to enhance understanding.

Gale ebooks (Gale Virtual Reference Library) This link opens in a new window
Coverage: Varies
Provides access to encyclopedias, almanacs, and specialized reference sources for multidisciplinary research.
Oxford Reference
Coverage: Varies
Online reference product, spanning 25 different subject areas, bringing together 2 million digitized entries across Oxford University Press’s Dictionaries, Companions, and Encyclopedias.

Encyclopedia of Food and Culture
A single authoritative source by food historians, anthropologists, chefs and bakers, nutritionists and dieticians, farmers agronomists and horticulturists, food stylists, and specialists in the culinary arts. If you are taking the cuisine route, this is the source for you.
Dictionary of Plant Sciences
This dictionary offers broad coverage of all aspects related to the field of plant sciences including biochemistry, physiology, cytology, ecology, genetics, evolution, biogeography, earth history, and earth sciences.

Getting lost in the stacks

The Cultural History of Plants
This book is a general reference on the history of useful plants.
The Healing Forest
This source combines nearly half a century of field research to document and describe 1,479 species and variants, representing 596 genera in 145 plant families.
Native American Ethnobotany
An extraordinary compilation of the plants used by North American native peoples for medicine, food, fiber, dye, and a host of other things. Anthropologist Daniel E. Moerman has devoted 25 years to the task of gathering together the accumulated ethnobotanical knowledge on more than 4000 plants. More than 44,000 uses for these plants by various tribes are documented here.

Google!

Google is great! It is arguably the best search engine available and is a great place to start research and get background information. However, Google isn't the best place to go for academic research. You will find a lot of irrelevant and misleading results. Use Library Databases to find information for academic papers!

Always use your brain and think critically about your results. Don't just automatically trust the information you find!