RUSS 101 - Any Topic (McLellan): Finding Information on Your Topic

The types of sources you can find will depend on what type of topic you choose.  Ideally, you will find Russian sources to use in your research.  These sources might be web pages, but they can also be newspaper articles, magazine articles, books, or other sources.  Ask me for help if you are not finding anything in Russian on your topic.

Wikipedia -- in English and in Russian

• This is a great starting place for any research on your topic.  I usually read both the English-language article and the Russian-language article.
• It is important to remember that Wikipedia is written by the community.  It is possible that there might be inaccurate information in an article.  If you see something that you suspect might not be correct, verify it in another source.
• The English Wikipedia article and the Russian Wikipedia article will not be direct translations.  They will contain different information and will have been written by different people.  The Russian version is written by Russian speakers, so it is a good way to find out how Russians describe the topic and what phrases they use.
• Remember:  translating from English to Russian using your dictionary or an online translation site does not always work.  Sometimes the Russian phrase for something does not translate directly into the English phrase.  See the tab on "Learning Vocabulary".

Google

• You can search Google in Russian by just typing in Russian in the search box. 
• To find Russian images for your topic, try Google's image search and search in Russian.

Articles

• To find articles in journals or magazines, you need to search an index database.  The best ones for Russian-related topics are listed on the "Articles" tab on the Slavic Studies research guide.
• To find articles in Russian newspapers, you can try searching the newspaper's website.  See the "Newspapers" tab on the Slavic Studies research guide for links.

Books

• To find books on your topic, use the UC Library Search.
• Use a keyword search to find books in English.
• To find books in Russian, go to the Advanced Search.  Select "Russian" from the language select list.  Then, search on English keywords.  Searching with cyrillic letters does not work well in the catalog because until recently most Russian books were entered with transliterated authors and titles.