•Best Resources for Communication (General guide to resources for Communication)

•Using Interlibrary Loan

•Communication Dept. homepage

•Go to AskUs! for a live chat with a librarian, to send us your question via email, or to call us at the Reference Desk.

•Contact Liaison Librarian Erika Behling

Finding Web Sources
Organizations in the Field
Evaluating Web Resources
Citing Sources

Choosing a topic

If you have no idea what topic to choose, here are some suggestions:

• begin with a channel of communication (language, paralanguage, proxemics, kinesics, touch);
• begin with a smaller topic within a channel (under language, you could look at insult behavior, code-switching, language development in children, second language learning in adults, language use in classrooms, how people talk on the telephone, uses of metaphor, humor, dialects, conversation at the dinner table, topic switching, interruptions);
• begin with a context (interaction at work, at home, in school, in a police station, in a hospital, in a courtroom);
• begin with the identity of the group you want to study (gender differences, the elderly, young children, any racial or ethnic group, any neighborhood); or
• begin with the type of relationship (stranger/stranger interaction, service encounters, friends, couples, parent/child, teacher/student, doctor/patient, lawyer/jury).

Online Journals

A few organizations have online journals, but be aware that they provide access only to the tables of contents and save access to the articles for those who pay for a subscription:

• The American Communication Association publishes American Communication Journal.
• The Communication Institute for Online Scholarship publishes the Electronic Journal of Communication.
• Language, Society and Culture, is produced in Australia.
• The Canadian Journal of Communication is one of the few exceptions to the rule, where you actually can access most of the articles. As with all of these journals; however, it will take some looking before you find articles relevant to either this course or your research papers. Try volume 22 for an article by Jan Bavelas and colleagues on face-to-face dialogue.

Some journals are directly supported by publishers, and at least tables of contents are usually accessible from the publishers' home pages. These journals are especially appropriate for this course:

• Research on Language and Social Interaction
• Language in Society
• Howard Journal of Communications
• Text
• Current Issues in Language and Society

And some journals were initiated within other disciplines, but may still have a lot of value for this course because Communication scholars aren't the only ones who study communication behavior:

• Language
• Discourse Processes
• Discourse and Society
• Anthropological Linguistics
• Journal of Nonverbal Behavior
• Journal of Social and Personal Relationships

Finding Journal Articles

Locating Books

Use the Library Catalog to identify and locate books owned by this Library. A brand new feature of the Library Catalog allows you also to identify books owned by other University of Wisconsin libraries, which can then be ordered through Interlibrary Loan. To do so, just click on the "Other Library Catalogs" button.

Some subject headings that may be useful:

Of course, the strategy of starting with a keyword search, identifying pertinent subject headings, and then searching by "Subject Heading" works well with books, just as it does when you're looking for articles.

Electronic Books

Also available is the Library's collection of electronic books, which are accessed though netLibrary. Included are approximately 2,000 recently books published scholarly books, which can be accessed online from campus or home. The full-text of these books is searchable.

Communication Resources on the Web

The Library's Best Resources for Communication offers a list of Web sites that are useful for communication scholars and students. You can also find a selection of Communication-related web-based reference sources here.

Organizations in the field

These often publish journals, and also often have web pages that will guide you to research (web pages for the organizations usually have links to the journals, as well as sometimes to research bibliographies; web pages for the journals generally list tables of contents):

• International Communication Association (publishes Journal of Communication, Communication Theory, Human Communication Research, and Communication Yearbook)
• National Communication Association (Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication Monographs, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Journal of Applied Communication Research, Text and Performance Quarterly, and Communication Education)
• Eastern Communication Association (Communication Quarterly, Communication Research Reports)
• Central States Communication Association (Communication Studies)
• the Western States Communication Association (Western Journal of Communication, Communication Reports)

Top of Page

Some organizations have lists of resources available on the web:

• Try SSCA's Language and Social Interaction Division, which provides a good starting point.
• NCA has a page with links to many of the communication departments in the country, and many departments list their own faculty's publications, and/or resources useful to their students, many of which will be useful to you.
• The Institute for the Study of Language and Society (in England) has a page of references produced by their researches.

Some professors at other universities have put together bibliographies having to do with language and social interaction for their students that you may find useful. Some examples are:

• academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/meth-bib.htm
• http://www.ling.rochester.edu/linglinks.html
• members.aol.com/nonverbal2/index.htm
• or, for an international one: http://arts-humanities.cant.ac.uk/Language-Studies

Researchers in some areas have published lists of references on the web, as with pages on:

• ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (www.pscw.uva.nl/emca/resource.htm)
• gay and lesbian uses of language (http://www.ling.nwu.edu/~ward/gaybib.html)
• language and gender issues (this is a guide to syllabi on the topic, all of which provide references: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jlawler/gender.html
• qualitative research generally (www.ualberta.ca/~jrnorris/qual.html)

You can find the most relevant of these sorts of pages by doing searches according to your topic. If you already have the name of a major researcher in the field, you can check for a web page which may list that person's publications, as a way of finding additional sources. Of course, some major scholars you will be reading, or reading about, are either deceased, or have chosen not to prepare web pages, so not everyone's bibliography is available that way. Then you have to resort to the more traditional resource tools available in the library, such as the Social Science Citation Index.

Evaluating Websites

Occasionally there are very good summaries of basic topics on the web, such as Walt Wolfram's introduction to sociolinguistics (http://www.lsadc.org/web2/socioling.htm).

However, you must be careful of these - it is essential that you be able to determine the qualifications of the writer, and so decide whether the author is someone you should be listening to! Anyone can post on the web, since, unlike professional academic journals, experts in the field have not checked the validity of the content for you. Therefore you need to decide if you're reading the writing of an undergraduate like yourself, who may not be correct in all statements, or a faculty member who is more likely to have studied the material for a long time. In this case, Wolfram is well-respected, and his essay is a quite helpful brief introduction to the topic by a major scholar known for his publications in sociolinguistics. How could you determine that for yourself? Here are several suggestions: back up on the address (here, look at http://www.lsadc.org, and discover it is the Linguistic Society of America, a well-respected national organization, so the piece by Wolfram is essentially pre-approved for you. Or do a search on Walt Wolfram, and discover that he's currently a professor at North Carolina State University (you can read his biography at: http://www.ncsu.edu/linguistics/bios/wolfram.htm).

For further guidelines on how to evaluate a web site, see: http://www2.widener.edu/Wolfgram-Memorial-Library/webevaluation/webeval.htm.

Even more rarely there is a good article that you can read through the web. One example is Adam Kendon's summary of how to do research on gestures (http://www.univie.ac.at/Wissenschaftstheorie/srb/srb/gesture.html). As Kendon is the acknowledged expert on the topic, anything he writes, in any form, can be trusted to be reasonable. If you find an article on the web but are having trouble figuring out the validity of the content, bring it to class and we'll discuss it.

Top of Page

The Communication Department at UW-Parkside recommends that students use the format developed by the American Psychological Association (APA) to format papers and references. These publications and Web sites can be used to determine the proper format.