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COMM 1020: Introduction to Public Speaking: Research & Resources

Use this guide to find sources for informational and argumentative speeches.

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Summon searches across 80% of our library content with just a few keywords. You can change the publication dates, limit your results to full text, to scholarly materials, or to any combination of document types. Enter your keywords in the search box below to search Summon.


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Data & Statistics

The best place to find data and statistics on virtually any topic is government departmental websites. Don't see anything related to your topic? Google "your topic + statistics site:.gov" to find your topic on government websites.

More Specialized Library Research Databases/ Scholarly Articles

Ebsco Host

You can search all of EBSCO to identify scholarly and non-scholarly articles. However, you may have better results if you use a morespecialized article database depending on how discipline-specific your topic is. For example, if you select a topic that has something to do with teacher compensation at charter schools, using an education database will mostly return results from an education-related perspective. Below are a few specialized databases.  You can also use our full listing of databases.

Research Databases for Finding Information about Speech Topics

You may want to begin by doing some background research on your topic.  The following databases provide short readings on topics, newspaper/magazine articles, pro/con discussions, and counterpoints. 

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