Legal Research in Education: Background Info

Articles chop up your topic into little, narrow questions. If you find 5 articles, each presenting a narrow study, it's often hard to see how they fit together and what question they are all trying to answer. But encyclopedias and handbooks

• Give you overviews of your topic
• Lead you to the important questions asked by researchers.
• Contain articles written by experts in their fields.
• Put your idea or question into a historical, research, or social context.
• Lead you to further references.

Blogs give you ideas about talked-about issues.

Generally are openly biased (the author has a point to make and may have little research to back him or her up.)

Keep you up-to-date on what's going on around you.