COM 340: History of Mass Communication: Secondary Texts

• Secondary texts provide historical context and a framework with which to fit your more narrow research topic.
  
  
• Secondary texts allow you to see how others have viewed your topic -- which themes and arguments have been made over the years by scholars.
  
  
• Secondary texts are written by expert scholars. Before publication, academic books and articles are vetted by other scholars in a process known as peer review. 
  
  
• Secondary texts are based on evidence (primary texts) that are cited in the footnotes and bibliography. Secondary texts are often a quick way to identify important primary texts that you too may wish to use in your research paper.

Cartoon from Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State University

• Use the toolbar on the left of your results lists to limit the Format to Books -- this will automatically omit book reviews, other articles and such from your search results.
• When searching for a specific book use quotations around the first few words of the title, e.g. "making of a counterculture"
• Getting too many irrelevant results? Use the toolbar on the left to narrow down your search.  You can limit by format, author, language, publication date, etc.

Search these databases to find articles published in scholarly journals, trade journals, and popular magazines.   

Link your search terms using the AND connector. For example: vietnam and media.

To find the fulltext of the article (if not provided directly in the database), click on the button and work your way through the screens. Not all articles will be online, some may only be in print, others may not be available at the UW.