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Starting Research in Anthropology


Contact Librarian: Miriam Rigby, rigby@uoregon.edu; 346-7202

Finding Background Information:

  • Encyclopedias and dictionaries are a useful place to gather background information on your topic.

  • Annual Reviews in Anthropology are review articles on various topics in anthropology written by scholars. These articles are great ways to get an overview of research on a topic as well as a reliable source of citations to important scholarship.

Looking for Articles:

  • Anthropology Plus indexes articles and essays in all of the subfields of anthropology, from the 19th century to the present.

  • AnthroSource, complete full-text archive of all of the American Anthropological Association's peer-reviewed journals.

  • GeoBase is the best database for finding human geography articles. Human geography's significant overlaps with Cultural Anthropology and Archaeology make this a great option for a broader search to supplement what you find in AnthroSource and Anthropology Plus.

  • Web of Science is an interdisciplinary index to articles in the sciences and social sciences, making it particularly useful for the multidisciplinary needs of anthropology researchers.


Looking for Visual Materials:

The UO Libraries have numerous image, film, and other visual materials. This is a small selection of some useful parts of our collection.

  • Ethnographic Video Online contains over 800 films (and growing). Most are focused on human culture but many are about animal life, especially primates. Some are finished documentaries, some are very rare raw footage. Highly searchable, and you can make and save clips in your account. It also includes the online book (& other writings) collection, Anthropology Online.
  • Digital Images Guide provides links to our many image databases and collections.
  • Films and Videos Guide helps you find films at the UO Libraries (on dvd, film, or vhs).

Primary Sources -- Fieldnotes, Field Reports, & Datasets:

  • Anthropology Online is a growing online collection of fieldnotes, key books in anthropology, and more. It is combined with Ethnographic Video's film collection.
  • Digital Archaeology Data Service contains unpublished fieldwork (grey literature) and more.
  • the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) contains datasets, grey literature, published articles, and more. Some is freely accessible/downloadable, some is just indexed.
  • Oxford Social Explorer contains millions of datapoints, collected from the US Census (1870-present), all American Community Surveys, Religious group information, Carbon Emissions data, and more for the United States. Data is presented as tables, downloadable files, and maps.

Citation Guides: