1. How do I search for my topic?
- Identify the main ideas of your topic and use those as your search words
- Each article has tags assigned to it, words or shorts phrases that make them searchable - you want your search words to match those tags
- Words like factors, effects, issues, relationships are usually not used as tags - don't include them as search words
Example: The topic for your research project is: The medicalization of female genital cutting
- A search about this topic could be: medicaliz* female "genital cutting"
- Add an * to the end of a word stem to search for all words that begin with that word stem
- medical* will search for medicalize, medicalizing, and medicalization
- Put a phrase in quotation marks to search for its words as a phrase, not separate words
- "genital cutting" searches for genital cutting as a phrase, not separate words
2. How do I focus the search hits to just recent, academic journal articles?
- Use Refine Your Search options to focus your search results to just peer-reviewed articles
- Peer-reviewed articles:
- Check the box beside Limit to articles from peer-reviewed publications
- Check the box beside Journal article under Content Type
- Current/Recent articles:
- Under Publication Date, move the scroll bar over to 2000 to present
3. How do I know my search words match the tags assigned to articles about my research question?
4. I can't find anything on my research topic. What do I do?
- The search words you're using to describe your topic may not match the tags assigned to articles on your research question
- Try different search words that mean the same thing
- There may not be research tying your main ideas together yet.
- Try searching for your main ideas separately and linking their findings together
- If you've found one article that's relevant for your topic, look through the sources in its References list to see if any of them are also relevant to your research