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English: 76-10X Series (First-Year Writing): Virtue or Violence: Choosing a Response to Conflict

This guide contains a series of guides designed to help students enrolled in the 76-10X series complete their assignment according to the BEAM framework.

BEFORE YOU START: TIPS FOR A SMOOTHER EXPERIENCE

  • Make sure you authenticate using your Andrew ID after you click on My Account, on the library website.  This will help get a full experience of what the library has to offer (full-text, automatic login to databases, etc.).

  • Check that your Google Scholar is set up to recognize Carnegie Mellon Library resources.  Here are the instructions for linking Google Scholar to our libraries.

  • If you are working off-campus, check that you are set up properly.  Here are the instructions for connecting from off-campus.

RESOURCES & TOOLS YOU MAY NEED

BACKGROUND SOURCES

To find background sources, the best strategy is to look at encyclopedias, handbooks, dictionaries, and books.  This strategy applies to library catalogs and databases that contain "reference collections". 
Here is how you can locate these materials:
  1. First and foremost, build a list of related words (synonyms vs antonyms; broad vs narrow terms).  For example, Conflict (anger, battle, clash, collision, disagreement, rivalry, etc.) or Approach (resolution, management, settlement, solution, strategy, etc.)
  2. Always use Advanced Search so you can build a specific strategy, using AND, OR, NOT, and specific fields:
    • For example: [Subject] contains Conflict AND [Subject] contains Resolution
  3. Don't forget to use truncation (a character that is used to find various spellings).  This is typically automatic in today's searches BUT some databases require it.  Sample characters are * - a star replaces one or more characters at the end (conflict* = conflict, conflicting, conflicted, etc.), a ? typically replaces 1 character in any position in the word (Wom?n = woman and women), and so on.

Here are some sample results from our library catalog, based on the strategies above:

EXHIBIT, ARGUMENT, & METHOD SOURCES

These sources are more likely to be journals, specialized books, databases that contain data sets.  To find them, you need to think about the type of information you need and ask yourself:
  1. Who might publish that information?  For example, datasets on conflict are typically collected by organizations that have an interest in collecting this information: for example, the united nations, international organizations, gallop reports, etc.
  2. What type of exhibit?  Are you looking at historical data?  current data?  How long of a set?  Are you needing surveys?
  3. Where would this data be published?  reports (by for-profit), gallop surveys (by governments or a non-profit), statistical publications (typically by organizations)?  Original research (typically in journal articles)?

Here are core databases on this subject:

General Databases


Political & Policy Databases

Relevant Guides