English Research Guide

Gathering background information is an important step for any topic you're researching in your English course. This is called pre-research. 

Pre-research will provide you with a good understanding of a broad topic so you can identify keywords, narrow down the topic, and form a thesis statement or research question.

For example, you may be asked to write an argumentative paper and you choose the broad topic of human trafficking. After doing some background research, you may decide to focus your research on legislation like Trafficking Victims Protection Act and FOSTA-SESTA.

• Try one of the eBooks listed below for background research on a broad topic. A database like Credo Reference can also help with background research. Use the search box on the left to search Credo Reference and use their Mind Map tool.
• Google can be a good tool to help you identify more keywords. You’re just looking for ideas and inspiration at this point, not sources.
• As you do your pre-research, be sure to take notes! Seeing your keywords written down can help you make connections between keywords and ideas, which may then help you form a thesis statement and identify supporting arguments or evidence.

Online reference books (eBooks) are helpful for finding background information because they contain a lot of information about your topic all in one place. eBooks can be found in our library databases and are available at any time without a library card. Here are just a few of our eBook databases to get you started.

For more eBooks, please visit our A to Z Databases and sort the database Types by eBooks.