 Do you need to write a research paper? Try starting with the starting points. The starting points contain research guides that list the best databases for your subject area, and you might even find a research guide made by a librarian specifically for your class recommending the best databases to find resources for the very paper that you are writing. To find the starting points, go to the UTM Library website at utm.library.utoronto.ca. Scroll down the page until you see the starting points heading in the center of the page. The starting points have guides for every program at UTM. They are organized broadly into humanities, sciences, social sciences, and general resources. Some subject areas will be obvious. Chemistry, biology, and physics are definitely nested under the Sciences tab. Other subject areas won't be as obvious, so you might have to check one or two of these tabs to find what you need. The General Resources section has research guides that do not fit neatly into any of the humanities, sciences, or social sciences headings. For instance, research guides for ISUP, data and statistics, and general assistance for graduate students at UTM can all be found under General Resources. But let's imagine that you are taking a psychology course. The Research Guide for Psychology is nested under Sciences, so let's go ahead and click Sciences. The subjects are listed alphabetically, so navigate down to Psychology and click that. The landing pages for each subject will generally look like this. This white space will contain information for reaching out for assistance at the reference and research desk over online chat, booking a research consultation, or by email. You will see blue boxes over the left-hand side of the Research Guide, along with a photograph of and contact information for the liaison librarian for the subject area. The blue boxes are where you will get started. You will find two boxes and virtually all of the research guides at the UTM library, a subject resources box, in this case called psychology resources, and a course resources box, in this case psychology course resources. Most guides will have additional blue boxes to meet the needs of students and faculty in the subject area. In this case, there is a Citing, Writing, Presenting box and a Videos Research Methods Tutorials box. Let's look at the Psychology Resources box first. There are two ways to navigate these resource pages. You can scroll down the page, or you can navigate by headings using these gray boxes on the left-hand side of the screen. The headings vary wildly between subject areas, but you will generally find headings for major databases and for tertiary resources, such as dictionaries and encyclopedias. Notice that this Research Guide mentions the key database for psychology, psych info, right at the top. This is fairly common. If you are unsure which database is the best one, the top one will often be the correct answer. However, notice that psych info is listed twice. Notice that we also have a specialized databases heading. Let's click Psychology at UTM library to return to the landing page. Let's take a look at the Psychology course resources box. This page will have guides for specific courses. Course guides are listed by course code and title. Notice that some of these guides have dates next to them. These will usually be for courses that aren't taught in the current semester. Current courses will be up to date as a rule, but if you are ever unsure, feel free to reach out to the Responsible Liaison Librarian or ask us at the reference and research desk. Course resource guides are designed to meet the needs of specific courses, so the content and formatting will vary greatly from guide to guide. Let's look at two of them, Psych 100 experiment lab design and Psych 321 cross-cultural psychology. For Psych 100, the landing page focuses on contact information for students to get instruction through chat, email, or in person. There is a tab, Help with Lab Design. The tab, Find Experiments, is particularly interesting because it gives detailed instruction on using the most important psychology database, Psych Info, in a very specific way tailored for the needs of students in Psych 100. Finally, there is a tab for writing and citation. Let's look at the course guide for a Psych 321. This landing page is quite different. It contains concise information on empirical sources in psychology. Similar to the Psych 100 guide, there is instruction on using the database Psych Info. But whereas the Psych 100 guide focused on how to use Psych Info to find papers with experiments, this guide focuses on how to use Psych Info to find empirical studies. There is a tab showing search examples. Similar to the Psych 100 guide, there is a tab on writing and citing. And there is a tab for contact information to get help. But whereas the Psych 100 guide placed that right on the landing page, this guide places it at the end. This makes sense since 100 level students are more likely to need help earlier in the research process than 300 level students, since the former are more likely just starting out in the area of study of psychology. 300 level students are encouraged to seek instruction from us too. We all get stuck sometimes, but they are more likely to have the research skills to get started on their own before turning to us. So looking at these two course guides, we see that there are some similarities, but also differences tailored to the needs of these two very different courses. For most research projects, we encourage students to start with the starting points, either the subject resources pages or the course resources pages. And remember, we just took psychology as an example, but there are starting points for all subject areas supported by UTM. History, biology, sociology, cinema, we support them all at the library. If you need any help, feel free to stop by the reference desk at the library. Email us at askutml.utm at uterano.ca or use the online chat from the UTM library homepage and we can help.