Encyclopedias and handbooks offer good summaries of specific topics, covering major issues and controversies, identifying important theories and scholars, and brief bibliographies of useful works. Handbooks are built from journal article-length chapters that usually provide more context and discussion than encyclopedia articles, and they will have longer bibliographies, too.
HINT! Handbooks often place their bibliographies in a separate chapter at the end of the volume. To work quickly, open the bibliography chapter in a new browser window. You can toggle back and forth from text chapter to bibliography chapter. You'll need to open a third browser window for the PennText Article Finder, too.
The Penn Libraries has an enormous book collection on families and related topics.
You may already have citations of relevance to the text on which you are working. These resources will help you find an online or print version of the cited work.
These bibliographies and databases will help you to identify interesting readings on families and related subjects. Some of these databases will provide fulltext, but they should all have PennText Article Finder buttons or links that will point to online fulltext or print versions.
HINT! Try a few test searches, look at titles that catch your attention, read their abstracts and note down their subject headings or descriptors. Then try to build searches using synonyms and clusters of subject headings or descriptors.
These e-resources will help you find U.S. federal government statistics on families.
