Research Links
The following are links useful to Missouri State Debaters, but others may find them useful as well.
Missouri State Electronic Resources
Lots of electronic resources are available from the Library's home page, and particularly TD Net, useful for seeing what journals are carried by the library. Also, look at the Indexes and Databases list. Here are some of the really useful databases!
Project Muse: A collection of several journals that are VERY useful for critical debate.
Nexis: The weaker, but still very powerful, version of the Lexis database. Millions of articles.
Communication and Mass Media Complete: Includes several Communication Journals, and readings on rhetorical criticism influence some critical arguments. This is part of the larger Ebsco host system. It also includes some debate theory sources, including Contemporary Argumentation and Debate.
J-STOR: Lots of journals are stored in full text. In many cases, the articles are scanned images and are downloadable. If you download the high quality version, it should be possible to use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software to read it.
Mobius: If our library lacks a book, you can probably get it via Mobius. It will take 2-3 days, typically. You can locate any book in any library, worldwide, by using the Worldcat (World's Card Catalog). If not available from Mobius, you can use Inter-Library Loan (also for articles). If purchasing is better, consider Bookfinder (which will compare the Amazon prices to several other online vendors. Lots of libraries use Bookfinder, and occasionally they will allow you to buy a book from there at replacement price instead of paying the full price for a lost book charge. But, you have to ask nicely…
Many of these assets require that you be on campus. A work-around is to establish a VPN Connection with the campus system first. You can get instructions and free software download from the Virtual Private Network Computer Help Page.
And, of course, lots of debaters prefer to search using Google or Google News. Google scholar is also a great resource (although sometimes you have to go through TD Net to get full text access), and you can also set up alerts to monitor for your frequent searches. Searches for blogs or create your own search engine, as Harvard did in this search engine for think tanks.
A seemingly lost art is the useful of government documents. There are lots of cards in Congressional hearings, from the Congressional Research Service, and several designer search engines as well.
External Electronic Resources for Debate Research
Useful debate resources for NDT/CEDA debate include the Caselist (which has thousands of speech documents from actual debates), the CEDA Forums (a discussion forum which includes work from the topic committee), the NDT, CEDA, and ADA webpages (including the ADA Novice Curriculum), and the tournament listing and results on Tabroom.com.
Useful debate resources for NFA-LD include the Caselist, the NFA webpage (including NFA-LD info and Rules). and tournament info such as ForensicsTournamnt.net, SpeechWire, and the CFO Calendar.
It requires a subscription, but the Stratfor Intelligence Network has great cards about global issues, and sometimes makes different types of claims than you'll find in the traditional literature.
COM 321 Resources
The COM 321 debate class has a small resource library.
This link includes a sample syllabus for COM 321, a list of links to online debate lectures, and a "cheat sheet" which is really helpful for new debaters in NFA-LD. The online lectures list also indicates how many minutes each lecture takes.
Date Last Modified
When publication dates are hard to find, the Date Last Modified is sometimes meaningful.