   FALVEY MEMORIAL LIBRARY

You are exploring: VU > Home > Research > Course Guides > Communication Courses > Theories of Mass Communication

Theories of Mass Communication

This guide is suggested for students of COM2300 or those interested in mass media.


Communication Subject Guide - For more communication resources.



Find a Topic - Encyclopedias

 Communication Subject Reference

  Communication Handbooks

  Encyclopedia of Communication and Information

  Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics, Media, and Communications

  Encyclopedia of Communication Theory

  Encyclopedia of Political Communication

  Encyclopedia of Children, Adolescents, and the Media

  Oxford Bibliographies - Communication, Political Science, International Relations

  International Encyclopedia of Organizational Communication


Finding Articles

Scholarly/Peer-reviewed

Article databases can be searched using key terms to find these articles.  There are several useful databases in communicatoin:

Communication and Mass Media Complete
CMMC offers cover-to-cover (core) indexing and abstracts for over 300 journals.  Many major journals have indexing, abstracts, PDFs and searchable citations from their first issues to the present.

Communication Abstracts
Communication Abstracts provides abstracting coverage of books and journals in all areas of communication studies (mass, interpersonal and new communication technologies).

ComAbstracts 
From the Communication Institute for Online Scholarship, this is a database of the abstracts of primary literature for communication studies.  Strong tools for browsing such as concept explorer, idea monkey, and index searches.

News Sources

The Library subscribes to a variety of newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post,  and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Access to the text of many newspapers is available through Proquest Newspapers and Lexis Nexis Academic.

See also this recent Library Blog post about Fetching Newspapers.


Books

While researching your topic, don’t forget to take a look at the vast collection of books Falvey has to offer.  You are probably accustomed to finding scholarly articles as part of a research project, but books are also a significant area of scholarly publishing.  Don’t forget to hit the stacks! (Or, click through to our many online and e-books.)

To search for books, go to the library’s Search tab, and then click the smaller Books & More tab.  You can search for keywords, or you can use the drop-down menu to search for specific titles or authors.

If your project involves new media, check out the library’s collection of new media books.  Here are a couple of highlights:

The Breakup 2.0: disconnecting over new media
by Ilana Gershon
2010
Cornell University Press
-

 

 

Always On: language in an online and mobile world
by Naomi S. Baron
2010
Oxford University Press
-

 

 

Hacking: digital media and technological determination
by Tim Jordan
Digital Media and Society Series
2010
Cambridge Polity Press

  Handbook of Media Audiences
This handbook offers a comprehensive overview of the complexity and diversity of audience studies in the advent of digital media.

Need a book the library doesn’t own?  Put a request through our EZ-Borrow or ILLiad services.

Often it is easier to review a book on your topic before beginning your article searches.  A book can give a broader perspective on your topic, while journal articles tend to be very narrowly focused.  Even if you do not reference the book in your term paper, it can still serve as an important source for finding key scholarly research articles on your topic.


Citations

APA Style

Even though you may have used APA style before, you may be full of dread at the thought of writing your reference list.  The library is here to help!

Whether writing your reference list by hand or proofreading a Refworks bibliography, you will definitely need to have the APA rules on hand.  Check out the resources below:

  • If you find the Publication Manual confusing or scary (or both), try the APA Online Tutorial.  This video guide is clear and easy to watch.  It gives a thorough overview of how to format your paper and cite your sources.
  • For those trickier scenarios (how do I cite my class notes?  how do I cite a blog post?), try searching the APA Style Blog.  This is another official APA site, so it is an authoritative source.

Refworks

RefWorks is a Web-based software package designed to help you easily gather, manage, store and share all types of information, as well as generate citations and bibliographies.

See the Library Guide to Refworks for more information.


Helpful Tips & Guides

Citing and Evaluating Resources

Finding Full Text

DOI: Digital Object Identifier

Video Tutorials

Villanova Writing Center


 


Last Modified: 2017-06-12 11:38:42
https://library.villanova.edu/research/course-guides/communication-courses/theories-mass-communication
library.villanova.edu
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-51
32668
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:W6BEMCQQMYVHCJBC7C6JQQJY52YT4WM6
<urn:uuid:3fad7665-aeb5-4efe-a8b2-616cce4d886e>
2017-12-15T10:46:14Z
153.104.6.122
text/html
sha1:2TUJUHB7IFSO3KIRUGTNOU5NNW6P7DKV
<urn:uuid:60a7da34-0bb9-4eda-afc6-3791e3998606>
https://library.villanova.edu/research/course-guides/communication-courses/theories-mass-communication
length
response
<urn:uuid:0d17504c-118b-45ff-9db2-935599326d34>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-183-105-150.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-51
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for December 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf