INTL 360U Bollywood: Communicating Contemporary South Asia through Cinema: Introduction

Guide to Intl 360U Bollywood: Communicating Contemporary South Asia through Cinema

Overview

This guide is designed to assist you in gathering resources for your Intl 360U final paper, which will require refereed sources
To help you find the ten refereed books and journal articles you'll need, the guide provides information on:

-Finding Background Information
-Finding e-Books
-Finding Articles
-Database Search Techniques
-Citation

If you need assistance finding additional materials, the guide includes information on contacting the library for personalized assistance.
 

What are Refereed Sources?

The internet is flooded with information sources, some trustworthy, others decidedly not.
In academic publishing, refereed sources are materials that have passed through an exhaustive review process.
This guide highlights 3 types of scholarly sources:
1) General overviews that provide background information (See "Background Information")
2) E-books produced by reputable publishers (See "Finding e-books")
3) Academic journal articles (see "finding articles")

Each resource type has a different purpose, which will dictate when you use each.
General overviews provide a big picture summary of your topic. They are a great starting point because it gives you the "Big Ideas" on your topic.  A general overview, for example, is a book like Bollywood Cinema, which discuss the whole topic of Bollywood.
E-books (also called scholarly monographs) are more detailed, and will focus on a topic in more detail. Once you have a topic, and want to learn more about that specific idea, this will be your next stop. As an example, the book Young Muslim women in India : Bollywood, identity and changing youth culture goes into detail when discussing the topic of women in Bollywood, while a general work on Bollywood will not.
Articles tend to be very detailed, but narrow in scope. Typically you will move on to articles after you have a very specific question. As an example, the question "how are Sikhs depicted in Bollywood Cinema?" is too specific for a book to cover, but this is exactly the type of issue an article would examine.

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