Use the links below to explore current issues, find a topic for your paper, and research arguments related to that topic.
Research Databases
Academic Search Ultimate Guide
A great place to begin your research. It covers all subject areas, contains mostly full-text articles, and contains both popular and scholarly articles.
CQ Researcher
A fantastic resource to use when you want to learn about hot topics and current issues. Each report features background information, pro/con debates, a chronology, and a bibliography with other resources to explore. Includes topics such as animal rights, drinking on campus, climate change, medical marijuana, and other current controversial issues. New reports added weekly.
JSTOR Guide
A full-text database of scholarly articles. It covers a wide variety of topics from economics to African American studies to biology. It is a great place to gain a contextual understanding of your topic.
Nexis Uni Guide
Offers coverage from a wide variety of national, local, and university newspapers and is a terrific resource to use when you need information on current events and campus-related information.
Google Scholar
A part of Google that searches only scholarly or academic articles or other publications. Don’t ever pay for an article on Google before you check to see if you can get it for free from the library.
Websites
ProCon.org
This is a great site to give you some ideas of current topics and how to put those topics into a research question.
Public Agenda
A great source for discovering and analyzing public opinion on a current topic. Each guide contains and overview of the issue and background data including statistics from major public opinion polls in easy-to-understand graphs.
Stateline
Use this source to browse current news stories to generate research ideas. You can search this resource by individual state or on a national level.
Times Topics
Each topic page collects all the news, reference and archival information, photos, graphics, audio and video files published on topics ranging from Madonna to Myanmar. This treasure trove is available without charge on articles going back to 1981.