Use these sources to find background information on your topic. Background sources are generally not appropriate for citation in research assignments.
Oxford Reference is collection of over 500 reference ebooks, including dictionaries, guides, and companions spanning 25 different subject areas. Contents range from short-entry, general reference to more in-depth articles on specialized subjects.
The perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. From Oxford University Press, VSI offers concise introductions to a diverse range of subjects. Offering a bridge between reference content and higher academic work, all titles provide intelligent and serious introductions to a range of subjects, written by experts in the field who combine facts, analysis, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make challenging topics highly readable.
Over 4,000 reference e-books in the Social Sciences. Fully searchable as a group or browse by title, subject, or author.
Free access to more than 1.2 million bibliographic records of journal articles and other education-related materials, including including books, research syntheses, conference papers, technical reports, policy papers, and other education-related materials. This is the same database as the free site available from the Educational Resources Information Center.
The Social Sciences Citation Index is a multidisciplinary index to the scholarly journal literature of the social sciences. It fully indexes more than 1,725 journals across 50 social sciences disciplines, and it indexes individually selected, relevant items from over 3,300 of the world's leading scientific and technical journals. Part of the Web of Science / Web of Knowledge.
An index to the international literature in sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. Provides abstracts of journal articles and citations to book reviews from over 1,800+ serials publications, as well as to books, book chapters, dissertations, and conference papers.
A growing data resource that will include Statistics Canada datasets, public opinion data, public-domain files such as the Canadian National Election Surveys and selected files from the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). Data can be searched, analysed and extracted. Tables can be saved in Excel or Adobe format. Full datasets or subsets can be downloaded into statistical packages.
Statista is a German company specializing in market and consumer data. According to the company, its platform contains more than 1,000,000 statistics on more than 80,000 topics from more than 22,500 sources and 170 different industries.
Statistics Canada produces statistics that help Canadians better understand their country—its population, resources, economy, society and culture. In addition to conducting a Census every five years, there are about 350 active surveys on virtually all aspects of Canadian life.
