TECHNICAL NOTE: At certain points, you will have to copy links provided and paste them into a search engine (e.g. Google) to access the resources indicated.

DISCIPLINE-SPECIFIC RESEARCH SOURCES. Each discipline (Business, Human Services, Education, Emergency & Disaster Management, etc.) uses research in specific ways. For example, some disciplines rely more on peer-reviewed articles than others. Some rely more on statistics and data than others. Some use information published over a long period of time; others need information from a much shorter span of time, even from just within the last year. Some may require more visual research, while others require textual research. Part of becoming a professional in your field is learning about the research sources specific to your field.

EDM SOURCES: In Emergency and Disaster Management, you will likely rely more on statistics, data, news accounts, governmental and NGO reports than on peer review and scholarly articles. Emergency and Disaster Management (EDM) is a new discipline and the scholarship in the subject is developing.

TRADE JOURNALS & SCHOLARLY JOURNALS: You will also want to consult professional literature. Professional literature is information written by professionals in your field that does not involve in-depth, original research vetted by other experts in the field; in other words, it is not peer-reviewed. Think of it as a magazine for other professionals in EDM.

YOUR EDM MCNY RESEARCH GUIDE: MCNY has created several research guides to help you with your work.  The guide displayed below is for Emergency and Disaster Management. We have another guide to help you with statistics and demographics.  Demographic information can help you better understand a particular community so as to assess their needs. Examples include: America Factfinder, US Census, NYC Population FactFinder, DataUsa, and EuroStat.

MATCH THE SOURCE TO TRHE QUESTION. So, how do you decide what source you need?  You can start by asking yourself certain basic questions about the topic you want to research. Let’s say you are interested in learning about how Hurricane Sandy affected the Far Rockaway neighborhood of Queens in New York City.  You will want to break down this topic into its different components.  

In fact, newspapers will be a great source of information for you. They can provide both first-hand accounts of a disaster as well as later analysis of data. Of course, you can find newspaper articles online through a Google search or search online within a Google search. But, it's much more practical to search for newspaper articles in the MCNY Library databases. ACADEMIC SEARCH COMPLETE, EBSCO, PROQUEST are all databaes that give you acess to a wide range of newspaper articles from different publications.  

EDM SPECIALIZED DATABASES: For scholarly articles about the impact of Hurricane Sandy, MCNY also offers you some specialized databases in your field such as the Business Continuity and Disaster Reference Center database.  This a small and highly specialized database; simply putting in the words “Hurricane Sandy” –-which elsewhere may lead to too many results-– here only leads to 40. You will find that these articles come from journals in your field with names such as Disaster and Natural Hazards, which may give you ideas for journals to consult in the future.

SUMMING UP: It’s always good to brainstorm about the different components of your questions and to think about what threads you may want to follow. When you have broken down your question a little, you’ll have a better idea of how to strategize and where to look.