East Asian Studies Research Guide for Undergraduate Students

An excellent source to start with is Oxford Bibliographies Online. While the record indicated here is for Art History, the resource covers many subject areas. The articles are all written by experts in the field and is presented in annotated bibliography format. This allows researchers to get a good sense of a field--who the most important scholars are, what resources to focus on, and how to expand your research. Click on the "+" icon below each title to find it in our catalog. Some pages to consider:

• Chinese Studies 
• Buddhism
• Art History [includes articles on Japanese Architecture, Japanese Buddhist Sculpture, Japanese Ceramics, Japanese Literati Painting and Calligraphy]
• Other fields of interest might be Philosophy [Chinese Philosophy], Cinema Studies [Chinese Cinema; Anime; Japanese Cinema; Korean Cinema]

• Handbooks are subject area tools and provide facts, terms, concepts, movements, etc. 
• Subject dictionaries focus on word definitions in a specific subject area. 
• Encyclopedias provide basic and general background information on a topic or subject. 
• Bibliographies are sources that contain detailed information about where to find further information on a specific topic or subject. Sometimes these look like the bibliographies you might compile at the end of a term paper. Sometimes they are books or online resources with a list of resources. Other times they act like annotated bibliographies, with short essays or statements describing the resource and why it might be useful to a researcher. Bibliographies differ from handbooks because they go into further depth on a topic.  They may include critical essays where the author identifies the core literature of a field of study. It illustrates what is available in a given field, while a literature review often opens up questions for new inquiries.