A manual for writers of research papers, theses, and dissertations, 7th edition - Kate L. Turabian 2007

Browse the shelves
Finding useful sources
Part I. Research and writing: from planning to production

You might think that online research is faster than walking around your library. But it can be slower, and if you work only online, you may miss crucial sources that you'll find only in the library. More important, you'll miss the benefits of serendipity—a chance encounter with a source that you find only in person.

If you're allowed in the stacks (where all the books that you can check out are kept), find the shelf with books on your topic. Then scan the titles on that shelf and the ones above, below, and on either side. Then turn around and skim titles behind you; you never know. When you spot a promising title, especially on a university press book with a new binding, skim its table of contents, then its index for keywords related to your question or its answer. Then skim its bibliography for titles that look relevant to your project. You can do all that faster with books on a shelf than you can online.

If the book looks promising, skim its preface or introduction. If it still looks promising, set it aside for a closer look. Even if it doesn't seem relevant, record its Library of Congress call number and bibliographic data (author, title, publisher, date of publication and so on; see part 2 of this manual for the details), and in a few words summarize what the book seems to be about. A month later, you might realize that it's more useful than you thought.

You can check tables of contents for many journals online, but browsing in the journals area of a library can be more productive. Find the journals that have promising articles. Skim tables of contents for the prior ten years. Most volumes include a yearly summary table of contents. Then take a quick look at the journals shelved nearby. Skim their most recent tables of contents. You will be surprised at how often you find a relevant article that you would have missed had you done your work entirely online.

If you are new to a field, you can get a rough impression of the academic quality of a journal by its look. If it's on glossy paper with lots of illustrations, even advertisements, it might be more journalistic than scholarly. Those are not infallible signs of unreliable scholarship, but they are worth considering.