Background Words Articles Books Websites

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Background Information
Encyclopedias and dictionaries  help you get and overview of your subject,  help refine your topic, and help you find keywords to use in searching for more information.

Encyclopedias

Encyclopedia Britannica  ***
Britannica Online includes articles from Encyclopedia Britannica, Britannica Books of the Year, Britannica Student and Elementary Encyclopedias and Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary and Thesaurus. Users can locate information quickly by using Boolean operators; browsing A-Z; or typing in words, phrases, or questions to receive a list of relevance-ranked articles. In addition to providing answers to a multitude of questions, Britannica Online also leads users to additional information about their topics though related articles, links to outside Web sites, and bibliographies.

AccessScience ***
AccessScience is the online version of the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology, containing 7,000 articles, 115,000 definitions, and biographies of more than 1,200 key scientists. AccessScience is updated with 3 or 4 breakthrough science and technology stories every week.

Columbia Encyclopedia
Containing nearly 51,000 entries (marshalling six and one-half million words on a vast range of topics), and with more than 80,000 hypertext cross-references, the current Sixth Edition is among the most complete and up-to-date encyclopedia ever produced

Funk & Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia ***

Oxford Reference Online  ***  This resource includes several reference books including:
A Dictionary of Earth Sciences
The Oxford Companion to the Earth

Dictionaries and Glossaries

American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language

Oxford English Dictionary ***

AccessScience *** This has a scientific dictionary as well as the encyclopedia.

Geologylink Geology Glossary

Oxford Reference Online *** This resource includes several reference books including:
A Dictionary of Earth Sciences
The Oxford Companion to the Earth
A Dictionary of Ecology
A Dictionary of Geography
A Dictionary of Weather

Internet Glossary of Soil Science Terms (Soil Science Society of America)

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Articles (indexes/databases) 

General

Academic Search Premier ***[Selected Articles in Full Text]
  Provides full text for more than 3,430 scholarly publications covering academic areas of study including social sciences, humanities, education, computer sciences, engineering, language and linguistics, arts & literature, medical sciences, and ethnic studies. This database is updated on a daily basis.

FindArticles - Free online articles
 Search this general article database for free articles by keyword or browse journal titles by topic area.

Geology Databases

GEOBASE***

GeoRef ***
Coming Soon!!!  GeoRef tutorial.

Other geology databases are listed on the OSU Geology Library Database and Index page.

All databases available through the OSU Libraries and OhioLINK

Book Catalogs

OSCAR (OSU Libraries' computerized catalog)

OhioLINK (OhioLINK [statewide] computerized catalog)

Web Searches

Portals/Gateways
These sites, which are intended to serve as "jumping off" points, will lead the researcher to a variety of useful sources that have been selected because of their relevance or quality.

Intute: Science, Engineering and Technology
The physical sciences hub of the Resource Discovery Network (RDN), a JISC funded service. An annotated directory of Internet resources for the physical sciences, including chemistry, physics, astronomy, earth sciences, materials, science policy,and science history. From the Consortium of Academic Libraries in Manchester, England.

OSU Geology Library Subject Links page

Web Directories (selected sites)
Google Scholar - a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature, includes links to OhioLINK
Yahoo - The biggest and most popular directory on the Web
INFOMINE - More than 100,000 resources useful for academic research
Librarians' Index to the Internet - More than 11,000 annotated resources
Scirus - Most comprehensive science-specific search engine on the internet. 
Web Search Engines (millions of sites indexed)
Google
AltaVista
AllTheWeb
Research Aids
net.TUTOR - Interactive tutorials on using Net tools, searching, evaluating results, and citing websites.

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