• Carefully study the text you have chose.
• Look at the book's introduction for the main sources and scholars mentioned there; look for a discussion of methods/methodology
  • Neighbourhood and Society: A London Suburb in the Seventeenth Century / Jeremy Boulton
• Next, mine the footnotes and bibliography; make note of key sources to look for

To get a source that you find cited in a footnote or bibliography:

• Be sure you know what you are looking at in the footnotes/bibliography - book? book chapter? journal article?
• Articles will always include a journal name, volume, issue and page numbers.
• Books will always include a city name (place of publication)
• Book chapters will usually include names of the author AND editor, and the page numbers that the chapter appears on within the larger book, for example:

F.J. Fisher, "The development of the London Food Market, 1540-1640," in E.M. Carus-Wilson (ed.) Essays in Economic History, London, 1954, 134-51.

• If it's a book chapter, you may need to search MRU Library for the larger book title instead.
• Use the MRU Library Discovery Tool - Search for articles, books, multimedia and more box - to see if MRU owns the item
• If it is an article and MRU doesn't own it, try searching for it by title and author's name in Google Scholar.

If our library does not have the journal or book you need, you can request the article through the InterLibrary Loan (ILL) service. The service is free, and the library will find the article for you at another university.

Register for an account if you don't have one:

In the Historical Abstracts database:

• Along with your topic search terms, search for the term historiography in the subject term field.

This will retrieve articles discussing previous research on a topic that can alert you to key authors, significant studies, and key theoretical approaches that historians have used to address this topic.

• Try searching for variations of the terms historiography, historians, scholars, etc. in the abstract field, along with terms about your topic. This should also retrieve articles that discuss the work of previous scholars.

In any database, search for your book title or it's topic and:

• Go to the Advanced Search and limit to "book review"
• Add "book review" or "review article" or "review essay" or "literature review" to your search

-- If you are having trouble finding reviews, you can try searching across many MRU databases using this tool

-- Limit to the discipline of HISTORY on the left

-- Limit to only SCHOLARLY JOURNALS by selecting Scholarly & Peer Review

-- Use ? to find plural and singular endings of a word: scholar? (will find scholar and scholar-s)

-- Use * to find all possible endings of a word: historiograph* (will find historiograph-y, historiograph-ies, historiograph-ical)

- Search for your book by title and author in Google Scholar. Follow the "cited by" link to see who has cited that source.

- In the database Historical Abstracts, go to the Cited References button at the top of the screen. Enter your title and author name, then follow instructions for viewing cited articles.