5.5 Using Reference Materials: Dictionaries, Indexes, Databases & Search Strategy
Key Takeaways
- 'Use of reference materials' is one of only four bullets under the 25% Ability to Use Source Materials domain, and it is tested as a matching task: a research need is described and you select the reference tool that answers it.
- Reference works are answer-shaped: a dictionary answers what a word means, an almanac answers what the number was, a gazetteer or atlas answers where it is, a biographical dictionary answers who the person was, and a bibliography answers what has been written.
- General encyclopedias are legitimate for orientation and for harvesting the bibliography at the end of an entry, but they are tertiary sources and must not carry the evidentiary weight of a college paper.
- Index and abstract databases locate articles, whereas the library catalog locates whole items the library owns; choosing between them is a recurring CLEP distinction.
- Boolean AND narrows a search, OR broadens it, NOT excludes, quotation marks force an exact phrase, and truncation with an asterisk captures every ending of a word stem.
5.5 Using Reference Materials: Dictionaries, Indexes, Databases & Search Strategy
Quick Overview: The College Board lists exactly four skills under Ability to Use Source Materials, and the first is use of reference materials. Sections 5.1 through 5.4 covered the other three — evaluating sources, integrating them, and documenting them. This section covers the first. The item type is consistent and recognizable: the stem describes a concrete research need (a student needs the 2024 unemployment rate for Ohio, a student needs to know what the word 'sublime' meant to eighteenth-century critics), and the four options list reference genres. Your job is to match the need to the tool that is actually built to answer it.
The reason candidates lose these points is not difficulty but vagueness: they know roughly what an almanac is, but they have never asked what question an almanac is designed to answer. Fix that, and the item type becomes nearly automatic.
1. Reference Genres and the Question Each One Answers
Every reference genre exists to answer one shape of question. Learn the shape, not the title.
| Reference Genre | The Question It Answers | Representative Examples | CLEP Trap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unabridged dictionary | What does this word mean, how is it pronounced, and how has its meaning changed? | Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster Unabridged | Reaching for a thesaurus when the stem asks about historical or denotative meaning. |
| Thesaurus | What are the near-synonyms of this word? | Roget's Thesaurus | A thesaurus supplies substitutes, not definitions; connotations still must be checked in a dictionary. |
| General encyclopedia | What is the basic background on this subject, and who has written about it? | Encyclopaedia Britannica | Excellent for orientation, unacceptable as the evidentiary core of a college paper. |
| Subject encyclopedia | What does a specialist consider essential background in this discipline? | Grove Dictionary of Music, Encyclopedia of Philosophy | Overlooked in options lists even when the stem names a discipline. |
| Almanac / yearbook | What was the number, date, record, or ranking in a given year? | World Almanac, Statistical Abstract of the United States | Almanacs report figures; they do not interpret them. |
| Atlas / gazetteer | Where is it, what are its boundaries, and what is the terrain? | National Geographic Atlas, Columbia Gazetteer | Confusing an atlas (maps) with a gazetteer (place-name dictionary). |
| Biographical dictionary | Who was this person, when did they live, and why do they matter? | American National Biography, Who's Who | Choosing a general encyclopedia when a dedicated biographical source is offered. |
| Bibliography | What has already been published on this topic? | MLA International Bibliography, an annotated bibliography | A bibliography lists sources; it does not contain their texts. |
| Concordance | Where does this exact word appear in this text? | A Shakespeare or biblical concordance | Useful only for close textual work on a single canonical text. |
| Style manual | How do I format this citation? | MLA Handbook, Publication Manual of the APA, Chicago Manual of Style | Style manuals govern form, never content credibility. |
| Government statistical source | What is the official measured figure? | census.gov, Bureau of Labor Statistics, congress.gov | Frequently the keyed answer when the stem demands current, authoritative data. |
2. Catalog, Index, and Full-Text Database: Three Different Machines
Candidates routinely blur these three, and the CLEP exploits the confusion.
- The library catalog tells you what the library owns as a whole item — a book, a journal run, a film, a map — and where it sits on the shelf. Searching a catalog for the title of a single journal article will fail, because the catalog indexes the container, not the contents.
- An index or abstract database tells you which articles exist on a subject and where they were published. An abstract adds a paragraph summarizing each article so you can triage before retrieving. Classic examples include ERIC for education, PsycINFO for psychology, and MLA International Bibliography for literature.
- A full-text database delivers the article itself. JSTOR archives back runs of humanities and social science journals; PubMed covers biomedicine; Nexis Uni covers news and legal materials; Web of Science adds citation tracking so you can see who has cited a study since it appeared.
The routine that answers most stems: consult a subject encyclopedia for orientation and vocabulary, mine its closing bibliography for names, run those names and terms through an index or full-text database for peer-reviewed articles, and use the catalog to retrieve whole books the database does not carry.
3. Search Mechanics: Keywords, Subject Headings, and Boolean Logic
Keyword Versus Subject Heading
A keyword search matches your literal words anywhere in a record, so it is fast, forgiving, and noisy. A subject heading search matches a controlled vocabulary — a fixed term that catalogers assign to every record on a topic regardless of the author's own wording. Searching the subject heading Capital punishment retrieves records that say death penalty, execution, and capital sentencing; a keyword search for death penalty misses all the records phrased the other way. The efficient move is to run one loose keyword search, open the best result, and then re-search using the subject headings that record displays.
Boolean Operators and Search Syntax
AND narrows gentrification AND displacement -> only records containing BOTH
OR broadens adolescent OR teenager OR youth -> records containing ANY
NOT excludes cloning NOT sheep -> drops records about Dolly
" " exacts "food desert" -> the phrase, not the two words apart
* truncates educat* -> educate, education, educational, educator
( ) groups (levee OR dike) AND flood -> keeps the OR set intact inside the AND
Two results follow directly and are frequently keyed:
- If a search returns too many results, add an AND term, add a date or peer-review limiter, or switch from keyword to subject heading.
- If a search returns too few, add OR synonyms, truncate the stem, or drop the most restrictive term.
4. Reading a Citation Before You Retrieve It
A research question sometimes asks you to identify what kind of source a citation describes. Three signals settle it quickly:
- A volume and issue number with a page range (vol. 46, no. 3, 2020, pp. 512–30) means a journal article.
- A publisher and a single date, with no container title, means a whole book.
- A title in quotation marks inside an italicized book title, with an editor, means a chapter or essay in an edited collection — cite the chapter author, not the editor.
5. Matching Research Needs to Tools: Worked Examples
| The Research Need in the Stem | Correct Reference Tool | Why the Obvious Distractor Fails |
|---|---|---|
| The per-capita income of Portugal in 2023 | Almanac or a government statistical source | A general encyclopedia entry on Portugal is written for background and lags current data. |
| How the word nice shifted from foolish to pleasant | Unabridged historical dictionary | A thesaurus lists modern synonyms and records no history. |
| A list of peer-reviewed articles on teacher retention | Index or abstract database such as ERIC | The library catalog indexes journals as containers, not individual articles. |
| Whether the library owns a specific 1978 monograph | Library catalog | A full-text database carries articles, not the library's shelf holdings. |
| Orientation to Byzantine iconoclasm before choosing a thesis | Subject encyclopedia | Jumping straight to a database wastes time before you know the field's vocabulary. |
| The exact form of an MLA works-cited entry for a podcast | Style manual | Source-evaluation criteria say nothing about citation formatting. |
| Every occurrence of mercy in The Merchant of Venice | Concordance | A dictionary defines the word but cannot locate it in a text. |
A student writing a research paper on Renaissance drama needs to know which scholarly articles have been published on the staging of Marlowe's plays. Which reference tool is designed to answer that question?
A researcher runs the keyword search 'urban heat island' and retrieves more than nine thousand records. Which adjustment most directly narrows the result set?
Which use of a general encyclopedia is appropriate in college-level research as described by the Ability to Use Source Materials domain?
A student needs to confirm the precise geographic boundaries and elevation of a mountain range mentioned in a primary source. Which reference genre is purpose-built for that need?