1. How do I search for my topic?
- Identify the keywords 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, causes, effects, issues, relationships are usually not used as tags - don't include them as search words
Example: Your research question is: Does religion in the African American community buffer against suicide?
- A search about this topic could be: "African American*" suicide religio*
- Add an * to the end of a word stem to search for all words that begin with that word stem
- African American* will search for African American and African Americans
- religio* will search for religion and religious
- Put a phrase in quotation marks to search for its words as a phrase, not separate words
- "African American*" searches for African Americans as a phrase, not separate words
2. How do I focus my search hits to current, peer-reviewed 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. I have too many irrelevant search hits. How do I focus them?
- Look through the Subject terms in the Refine Your Search sidebar and check the boxes beside the topic areas that interest you
- When you find an article that looks interesting, look at its assigned tags (bolded blue words under the article description in the list of search hits)
- Add any relevant tags to your search
- This will also help you develop your research questions and search for articles about your specific research questions
