 Oxford Bibliographies is a great resource to start your research since it provides scholarly sources that are recommended by experts. Because the sources that it recommends are organized thematically within a subject area, with brief introductions summarizing the topics and subtopics, you can quickly dive into the major issues related to a topic and find sources from which you can start planning your search strategy and develop your thesis and major arguments. To access Oxford Bibliographies, use the link which is embedded in this video and also listed in the description below. The sources you will find in Oxford Bibliographies are usually hyperlinked to digital versions that you can use online or to the records for print resources held in the University of Toronto library system. So accessing the resources is usually pretty easy. The entries in Oxford Bibliographies have been written by experts so you know that you are reading reliable resources. However, many of your professors at UTM prefer that you do not cite to Oxford Bibliographies itself. Rather, they prefer that you access and read the sources recommended by Oxford Bibliographies and cite to those instead. This is because Oxford Bibliographies online is a tool akin to a database to find reliable sources. Oxford Bibliographies is organized by subject. You can click browse by subject for a complete list of subjects. You can use either the simple search or the advanced search. When you use the simple search, it is important to know that some topics will have entries in more than one subject and these entries will be different since each will be written from the perspective of the relevant discipline. Let's search for the topic of abortion. We see immediately that the topic of abortion is outlined in at least five subject areas and potentially others. As I have already mentioned, each of these entries will discuss the topic of abortion and will recommend sources to read but each of these entries will be unique since each is written to address the topic of abortion within different subject areas so it might be advisable to at least skim through each entry. You will notice that there isn't any heading for women, gender, and sexuality studies because the studies are interdisciplinary. Depending on your argument or thesis, you can apply the lens of subjects such as sociology or anthropology. In contrast to the simple search, the advanced search can be useful when you know your focus and relevant disciplines. Let's use the advanced search now to search by topic with a simple keyword. For instance, let's search for the topic of abortion. You can choose to limit your keyword search to one or more subjects by clicking these little boxes. For instance, we might want to just choose public health, social work, and childhood studies. If we don't check any boxes, then Oxford Bibliographies will assume that we want to include all of the subject areas within our search. Let's click search to see our results. We see immediately that the topic of abortion is outlined directly in at least two subject areas and indirectly in others such as the fetuses and embryos article. As I've already mentioned, each of these entries will discuss the topic of abortion and will recommend sources to read, but each of these entries will be unique since each is written to address the topic of abortion within a different subject area. So it might be advisable to at least skim each entry. But let's imagine for our purposes that you know that you are interested in looking at the topic of abortion within the subject area of public health. You are most likely familiar with Wikipedia entries. And in many ways, an entry in Oxford Bibliographies is similar with the added benefit that they are written by recognized academics and link to curated academic sources. Like Wikipedia entries, the entries in Oxford Bibliographies are often long and cascade down the page divided into various headings. Usually there will be an introduction, general overviews, definitions of terminology, and then increasingly specific subheadings for subtopics. You will see a table of contents on the left hand side of the screen, but unlike Wikipedia, this table of contents in Oxford Bibliographies is not as clear. At a glance, you would think that these are all of the headings related to the topic abortion for the subject area of public health. It is not intuitive that you need to click this little black arrow twice, first to collapse the list, and then again to expand for the complete list of headings. Now we can jump between any of the headings and click back to the top to go to the beginning. Of course, we can just scroll through the entire entry if we wish, just as you might with a Wikipedia entry. Let's jump ahead to the heading Laws and Public Health Consequences. Each of the headings will have a brief description of the subtopic and how it relates to the whole. In this case, Laws and Public Health Consequences in relation to abortion. There might be key facts and figures, but the most important thing that you will find is relevant citations to books, articles, and other source types such as primary sources with brief discussions of how these sources might be useful for researchers interested in the topic. As you read, for source sounds of interest, you can either click the hyperlinked reference to jump to a full citation or scroll further down the page to all of the citations for that subtopic. When you consider whether or not to use these sources, you must keep your assignment specifications in mind and be able to determine what type of source you are looking at from the citation. For instance, does your assignment require that you only use peer reviewed articles? Do you need a primary source? For instance, I am fairly certain that this source is a book because of the publisher that is mentioned. I am quite certain that these two sources are academic journal articles because they mention journal names and bibliographic details that appear to be volume, issue, and page numbers. This last resource appears to be a primary source. It is a document produced by the United Nations and intergovernmental organization. It is academic and scholarly, but it is different from the book and academic journal articles because while scholarly books and journal articles might collect data, they usually do so with a further objective of analyzing that data and situating that data within a larger lens of discussing other primary and secondary sources with the objective of advancing a particular thesis or argument. Primary sources related to the subjects of public policy, or in this case public health specifically, are usually about collecting data or collating legal resources thereby providing raw materials for researchers like you so that you can create your own resources, which will be secondary in nature. To summarize, if you are in need of a certain type of resource such as a primary source or an academic journal article, then make sure that you open the resources to confirm that they are the type of resource required for your assignment. All that is left is to start opening resources and reading. When you see resources with hyperlink titles or DOI numbers, you can usually just right click the link and open the resource in a new tab. When you don't see a hyperlink, you will have to click the find this resource link to reveal the get it UTL link. If the University of Toronto library system has access to the resource, then you will be taken to the record in library search for the resource. Sometimes these will be in print and not online. I should also add that sometimes the links between Oxford bibliographies and library search do not work correctly. So if you click a link and library search tells you that we do not have the item, then you might want to try a separate search by title for the item in library search. However, sometimes we will not have access to the resource at all and you might need to go through interlibrary loan to order the resource. We talked about disciplinary differences. I would like to show you what this means using an example from Oxford Bibliographies. You can see from this side-by-side comparison that both of these articles are on abortion, one under the subject public health, and the other under the subject social work, and that each includes different descriptions of the topic and recommends different sources. Lastly, when you want to find the most relevant sources, you can also check the related articles that Oxford Bibliographies recommends for you. These might be worth looking at as well to find more sources. If you ever have any questions about using Oxford Bibliographies online, you can contact your liaison librarian, Yaya Umetsubo, by clicking liaison librarians on the library homepage and scrolling down for her contact information. You can also reach out to research specialists by clicking reference and research help, and you will find hours to meet with us in person at the library using online chat and by email.