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University Library

Research Skills

The following information is intended to help Archaeology students locate academic literature and sources for their research. It is by no means an exhaustive list. Please refer to the Library Catalogue if you looking for a particular book or journal title, or contact the Archaeology Liaison Librarian Richard Holmes for any specific advice

Defining and Refining a Research Topic

Encyclopaedias provide short overviews of a topic, theory, idea, concept or a person's work. Dictionaries provide short definition of a scholarly term or word. They can be a good starting point for an overview of a topic and refining it further.

Some useful reference resources for Archaeology are:

Finding journal articles

Online databases search for journal articles. This enables you to search for information on subjects when you don't know which book or journal you need. Some useful databases for Archaeology are:

  • Web of knowledge: Contains several databases and has wide ranging subject coverage, providing access to articles published in over 10,000 journals. The referencing software EndNote Web is available here.
  • Anthropology plus: Provides worldwide indexing of journal articles, reports, commentaries, edited works, and obituaries in the fields of social, cultural, physical, biological, and linguistic anthropology, ethnology, archaeology, folklore, material culture, and interdisciplinary studies. Coverage is from the late 19th century to the present.
  • British and Irish archaeological bibliography: Provides access to the entries in the British & Irish archaeological bibliography database 
  • Science Direct - Database for scientific research.
  • JSTOR: database of scholarly journals in history, economics, political science, demography, mathematics and other fields of the humanities and social sciences.
  • Dyabola: Developed for the humanities and the arts, it contains electronic subject catalogs of publications on the history of art and the ancient world.  

Those researching the history of disease might want to look at some of our medical databases, including Medline and Embase

Internet Resources

Evaluation of Resources

The Critical Thinking Exercise from Teesside University can help critical evaluation of information sources.

Image Collections

The Library provides access to a number of Image Databases. Remember that copyright exists for images as well as written texts. Unless stated otherwise you will need to request the orginiator's permission to reproduce an image.

Object and Image collections for Archaeology include:

Theses, Research Repositories & Conference Proceedings

  • Details of how to find Durham and other institutional theses can be found here
  • Durham Research Online (DRO) is Durham University's institutional repository.
  • OpenDOAR provides an alphabetical list of repositories grouped by country.
  • Web of Knowledge indexes the published literature of the most significant scientific conferences around the world.
  • ProceedingsFirst contains citations from worldwide meetings, conferences, expositions, workshops and symposia, and lists the papers presented.

Maps & Atlases

A number of Statistics, Maps and Data Services are availble online including Digimap, which is an online service that allows users to view and create maps of any location in Great Britain using Ordnance Survey map data. The map data can also be downloaded for use in other software packages. Users should register for Digimap via the IT service desk.

Maps
There are a selection maps kept in the Department of Geography. The collection of historical maps of the local area is housed in Archives and Special Collections at Palace Green.

There are also some useful books in the library on maps and cartography including:

Atlases
There are a number of useful reference volumes which include world atlases such as the Times Atlas of the World in 5 volumes; national atlases with information on natural resources and climate, population and human activities; and historical atlases covering specifics such as Ancient Egypt or the Crusades to more general atlases covering of world history.

Maps and atlases of special interest to Archaeology include:

Newspapers and Magazines

Newspapers are primary sources of infomation, they provide a useful way to keep up to date with current events as well as an opportunity to review historical archives.

E-books

E-books allow you to search within the contents of the book, unlike the library catalogue which just searches for book titles.

Citations and Referencing

EndNote is a useful tool which can help you manage your references, import a bibliography into your assignment and allow you to insert citations.