Hey all,
I come from a scientific background, but, for better or for worse, I have found myself in a history class and I need like, 10 sources for a research paper. Now, ordinarily, this would not be a problem, but I have to use the damned Ebscohost method of acquiring sources.
I guess I just need some direction from someone MUCH better than I. Most sources seem to be...books.
I don't see how you can narrow things down if you have to rely on perusing through entire books just to find singular points or whatever.
idk, I feel lost and any input would be appreciated haha
Don't dismiss the books straight out of hand! Unlike in the sciences, a lot of the most accessible and best (and certainly most detailed) scholarship in history is still published in book form. There's actually a very practical reason why: it is far, far more efficient to present quantitative rather than qualitative data - historians need a lot of words in order to adequately describe and analyse their evidence base. I usually recommend to my students that they aim for a roughly even split between books and journal articles for sources. It's also worth remembering that you aren't necessarily reading these texts to narrow down to single, usable data points - it can be much more effective to read for argument. That is, what is the author trying to convince you of? From there, you can contrast this with other authors' takes, and think about the ways in which they've managed to substantiate these claims. Dealing more directly and holistically with historians' work makes for much better essays than simply strip mining each text for one or two easily usable facts to throw in. Another bonus is that books tend to have very extensive bibliographies - you can browse through them to find other relevant sources that might escape a more general search.
In terms of articles, I'd echo u/Kugelfang52's recommendation of JSTOR, though it's coverage isn't quite perfect (for a lot of journals it won't have the most recent 5-10 years of issues, for instance). Often, your library will have access to these issues, but through another databases. How you find them will depend on how your library is set up, but in my experience the absolutely foolproof method is to plug the journal title into the catalogue, which should then let you know the various ways you can access issues. A lot of libraries also have search tools that let you search for electronic resources across databases, but I can't promise that this is possible at your institution.
You need Jstor. I much prefer it to Ebscohost. That said, occassionally you can find historiographical papers or books that you can find appropriate sources from. That will lead you to key terms in that historical field or topic. You can then go back to Jstor to narrow results.
What is the particular topic of discussion? Not to do the work for you, but maybe someone can provide some recommendations.