Religious Studies: Getting Started

The best place to start!

Reference sources are online or printed encyclopedias, dictionaries, atlases or any other source that is designed to provide a concise yet authoritative overview of a topic of research.

Reference sources are excellent sources to use when you are starting your research, because they provide:

• general background information
• brief and factual overviews
• explanations of terminology and definitions of terms
• a list of authors who are experts in the field
• bibliographies of sources for further reading

The following is a list of online reference materials that you can access both on-campus and off-campus.

To access these resources off-campus please sign in using your MyTyndale user name and password (that's the same password you use to log-in to your MyTyndale e-mail).

Wikipedia is an online resource that can be edited by anyone who has access to the internet.

It has been subject to much criticism by librarians and faculty in academia because:

• there are no guarantees that the writer(s) of the articles are qualified to write about the subject matter
• there is the real possibility that the author(s) could post misleading information
• the lack of any quality controls of the content in Wikipedia (i.e. fact-checking)

Wikipedia does have its good points:

• the content in Wikipedia is updated on a continual basis
• it does provide introductory information to a topic
• the bibliographies at the end of the articles do oft-times lead to authoratative resources

Because of its open nature Wikipedia is still held in much suspect by the majority of librarians and scholars.

If you decide to use any resources found in a Wikipedia bibliography you should make sure that that resource is authoratative.

For more information on assessing online resource, please see the "Evaluating a Website" page.