Pick a research topic

• Read your assignment instructions carefully
• Pick a topic that interests you and meets the criteria of the assignment
• Identify key concepts of your research topic
  • Need extra help? Click on Choosing an essay topic
• Do some background reading on your topic using Wikipedia
  • Using Wikipedia wisely (video)

Subject specific dictionaries and encyclopedias are useful for helping you figure out the jargon of a discipline and can give quick overviews of a topic to get you started. You can often pick up keywords to use in your search strategies from these sources: 

• New encyclopedia of Africa
• Dictionary of African Biography
• Oxford research encyclopedias. African history
• Encyclopedia of twentieth-century African history
• Student encyclopedia of African literature
• The African studies companion : a guide to information sources 
• ​A Political and Economic Dictionary of Africa 

Note: Historical dictionaries exist for almost all of the African Nations. To find them, do a TITLE search in the OMNI

• Example: Historical Dictionary of Algeria

Developing a good search strategy is important

• what is your assignment?
• what is the main topic?
• what aspect of the topic is of interest to you?
• who has an interest in that topic?
• what other language might they be using to talk about that topic? do they spell it differently?
• when was it relevant? is it a new idea, or a long standing issue?
• what other factors play into your issue? climate, population, government, geography, etc.

Once you've decided which terms are the most useful for your search, combine them in a boolean search. 

For example: Africa* AND (poetry OR literature OR composition)

• the brackets keep synonyms together
• the * will look for alternate endings
• AND/OR will modify a component to narrow or expand your results (the capitalization of AND/OR varies from database to database, it is better to get in the habit of capitalizing them)
• if you had a multi-word phrase, putting quotes around it will search specifically for those words, in that sequence, side by side such as "Human Rights"

Filters in the databases you probably want to apply include:  Scholarly/Peer Reviewed

Use this worksheet to write out your research topic and identify key ideas.

We house a major research collection of official publications for the study of Africa. This collection has been actively developed since 1970 and has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Extensive coverage is given to documentation from: Countries which were former British colonies: Examples: Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe

Government Portals 

For information on countries not listed below see the CIA World Fact Book and the US State Department's Bureau of African Affairs. See also the EIU.

Algeria | Angola | Benin | Botswana | Burkina Faso | Burundi | Cameroon | Cape Verde | Central African Republic | Chad | Djibouti | Egypt | Equatorial Guinea | Eswatini (formerly Zwaziland) | Ethiopia | Gabon | Gambia | Ghana | Guinea-Bissau | Ivory Coast | Lesotho | Liberia | Madagascar | Malawi | Mali | Mauritania | Mauritius | Morocco | Niger | Nigeria | Republic of South Sudan | Rwanda | Senegal | Seychelles | Sierra Leone | Somalia | South Africa | Tanzania | Tunisia | Uganda | Togo | Zambia | Zimbabwe |

African Union (AU) (formerly known as Organization of African Unity)

• Resolutions of the ... ordinary session of the Council of Ministers
• Decisions and declarations of the assembly
• Decisions and declarations of the executive council
• African Court on Human and People's Rights
• Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA) 
• OAU/AU Treaties, Conventions, Protocols & Charters
• Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs)
• African Union handbook 2014

Historical documents may have been included in the Africa Contemporary record which we hold for 1968-1983.

African Development Bank

East African Community

Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS)​

• The Commission
• The Community Parliament
• The Community Court of Justice
• ECOWAS Bank for Investment and Development (EBID)

Official journal of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) 

United Cities and Local Governments of Africa

United Nations

• United Nations Economic Commission for Africa
• United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization for Africa
• United Nations Habitat Regional Office for Africa
• United Nations Regional Information Centre for Western Europe

Government offices and international agencies with an interest in Africa include:

• The Commonwealth
• UK National Archives catalogue
• U.K. Parliamentary Papers (1801-)
• U.S. Central In​telligence Agency see the World Fact Book
• U.S. Department of State
• U.S. Office of Strategic Services. O.S.S./ State Department Intelligence and Research Reports
• National Archives Catalog, University Publications of America
• Internet Archive - Open Library - University Publications of America
• World Bank in Africa - see also World Bank e-Library
• World Health Organization (WHO) - Regional Office for Africa
• Africa Resources - Research Guides at United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld Library