Let's say you have to write a paper for Persuasion. Encyclopedias can give you background information that looks like this:
Persuasion from The SAGE Glossary of the Social and Behavioral Sciences
The exercise of influence. Persuasion can be accomplished by various means, including argument, entreaty, and expostulation. Interpretations of the word are broad, ranging from coercion to behavior modification. Persuade, the predicate form of the word, is often used interchangeably with the word convince, but their Latin origins show them to differ, in that convince comes from a word that means to conquer, while persuade comes from a word that means to advise, to make appealing, or to sweeten.
Persuasion as rhetoric has been discussed among scholars as far back as the ancient Greeks. In contemporary times, persuasion has become a subject of communications science and is studied for its application to political processes, public relations and corporations, advertising and consumerism, inter personal relationships, and societal change.
Persuasion theories include language expectancy, regarding the effects of linguistic variations on message perception, and inoculation theory, regarding message resistance. For more information, see Dillard and Pfau (2002) and Oxford University Press (2002) in the bibliography.
Persuasion. (2009). In L. Sullivan (Ed.), The SAGE Glossary of the social and behavioral sciences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Retrieved from http://proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/login?url=http://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/sagegsbs/persuasion/0
This is useful because you can now see that other words RELATED to persuasion include, advertising, marketing, endorsement. These types of sources give you background so that you can get more specific (including terms to search with) as you look for books and journal articles. These are also good for when you stumble across concepts that are unfamilar to you.
These are searchable collections of encyclopedias. You are searching more than one encyclopedia at a time.
Use these sources to locate encyclopedias or handbooks in OSU Libraries.