Credo Reference is an online collection of dictionaries and subject encyclopedias to help you discover background information on a topic. Sources like these provide overviews of topics and descriptions of concepts and ideas. They can also provide definitions, statistics, and other details. You can use this type of source to help narrow your research topic, find data to support your thesis, and identify keywords and main ideas to use as search terms.

Article databases like Academic Search Premier include citations to and, in many cases, the complete online text of, articles from academic journals, trade journals, magazines, and newspapers. This database is interdisciplinary, which means that, unlike subject-specific databases, it includes articles on most topics and can be a good place to start your research.