Tips for Creating a Research Process
Writers starting on research about a specific topic may be looking for resources that inform the history, context, and factual details that inform their script. This page is designed to provide basic resources and information about the research process.
- WGA Video Series: Research Methods for WritersWriters Guide Foundation video series on research methods for screenwriters. Includes a talk with Andrew Lanham (Just Mercy, The Kid) and Kevin Willmott (Da 5 Bloods, BlacKkKlansman), moderated by WGF Librarian Lauren O'Connor.
- Owl Purdue: "Research: Where to Begin"Purdue Online Writing Lab overview on conducting and citing research.
General Researching Aids & Methods
- UCLA Library WI+RE Writing Instruction + Research EducationQuick and practical research and writing tutorials, collaboratively designed by students at UCLA.
- Research Methods — Primary Sources This link opens in a new window
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Designed as a tool to support students of the humanities and social sciences, Research Methods Primary Sources introduces the key approaches to working with source materials and historical evidence. - SAGE Research Methods This link opens in a new window
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Books, reference works, and instructional videos about qualitative and quantitative methodologies in the sciences and social sciences. Includes Research Tools (online tools for planning research and choosing methods), Cases (examples of real research), Video (research process, data science, and methods) and Datasets (sample data chosen specifically to support practice with various statistical analysis methods).
Catalogs
Below are a number of library catalogs available to UCLA researchers. Use them to search for books, some selected articles, and moving image collections.
- UC Library Search This link opens in a new windowUC Library Search is the unified discovery and borrowing system for all 10 UC Campuses. Select the UCLA Library Catalog scope to search holdings of materials owned by the UCLA Library and other UCLA collections, whether online or in print. Does not contain full-text articles or article citations. Select the Articles, books and more scope to search for materials in all 10 UC campuses. More information in this guide.
- Online Archive of California (OAC) This link opens in a new windowFinding aids for primary source collections in all UC campuses and other contributing institutions, including libraries, special collections, archives, historical societies, and museums throughout California.
- WorldCat (OCLC FirstSearch) This link opens in a new window
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OCLC FirstSearch catalog includes citations for books, journals, manuscripts, maps, music scores, sound recordings, films, computer files, newspapers, slides, videotapes, archival material, etc., in libraries around the world.
- UCLA Film & Television Archive CatalogMotion pictures (silent era, classic Hollywood, independent cinema, LGBT collections, documentaries and newsreels, animated cartoons, foreign and contemporary American films), television (American telecasting from 1945 to date), and news and public affairs programs (1950 to date).
- Instructional Media Collections and Services CatalogIMCS holdings are also in the UCLA Library Catalog, but the collection does have a separately searchable database.
General Databases for Starting a Topic
These databases search across multiple disciplines, and can be good starting places for researching secondary source journal and encyclopedia articles on a topic.
- Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new window
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A multidisciplinary database that indexes over 10,000 publications, with the complete text of over 5,500 periodicals, including a mix of peer-reviewed journals, magazines, and newspapers. - Cambridge Companions Online This link opens in a new window
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Includes Companions to Literature and Classics, Companions to Music, and Companions to Philosophy, Religion, and Culture. - Gale E-Books (formerly Gale Virtual Reference Library) This link opens in a new window
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Online encyclopedias, dictionaries, and specialized reference sources, primarily in the social sciences and humanities. - JSTOR This link opens in a new window
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Full text of core scholarly journals from their beginning to approximately five years ago. Disciplines include botany, business, ecology, general science, humanities, mathematics, social sciences, statistics. Browsable by discipline and full-text searchable across all disciplines. UCLA has access to selected JSTOR e-books. - MasterFILE Premier This link opens in a new window
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Designed specifically for public libraries, this multidisciplinary database provides full text for more than 1,750 general reference publications dating as far back as 1975. Also includes biographies, full text primary source documents, and an image collection. - Oxford Handbooks Online This link opens in a new window
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Oxford Handbooks, now a part of Oxford Academic, provide review articles which summarize and analyze current research and trends in a given discipline. UCLA subscribes to most Oxford Handbooks Online, excluding a few individual titles. - Project MUSE This link opens in a new window
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Full text of current issues (from about 1990) of scholarly journals published by university presses, chiefly in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Browsable by discipline and full-text searchable across all disciplines. UCLA has access to Muse e-books published from 2017-present, plus a selected number of other e-book titles. - ProQuest This link opens in a new window
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Search platform for over 120 databases, from the AFI Catalog to Worldwide Political Science Abstracts. Includes scholarly articles, primarily in the humanities and social sciences, as well as newspapers and dissertations. - Routledge Handbooks Online This link opens in a new window
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Handbooks covering a wide range of humanities, social sciences, psychology and some science topics, published by Routledge, Ashgate and other imprints. Some CRC Press handbooks can also be accessed via this particular site. - Web of Science This link opens in a new window
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A multidisciplinary database, with searchable author abstracts, covering the journal literature of most disciplines. Indexes major journals with all cited references captured. Combines the following citation databases: Science Citation Index Expanded; Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI); Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI); Conference Proceedings Citation Index.