1. How do I search for sources about my research topic?
- Identify the keywords of your topic and use those as your search words.
- Each book and article has tags assigned to it, words or shorts phrases that make each book or article searchable
- You want your search words to match those tags.
- Words like impact, effect, or factors are not used as tags
2. I have too many search hits. How do I find what I need for my assignment?
- Use Refine Your Search options to focus your hits so they're more relevant to your assignment needs
- You can focus your search hits to:
- peer-reviewed or scholarly articles
- content type, such as journal articles, books, newspapers, or magazines
- discipline, sources relevant to specific disciplines
- subject terms, to help you focus your topic and sources to specific subject areas of interest
- publication date, so you get the most recent research
- language, such as just English articles
- Example: for your Criminology and Criminal Justice assignments, you should use peer-reviewed, scholarly sources and books and articles with up to date research:
- Under Refine Your Search:
- check Books/ebooks under Content Type to focus search hits to scholarly books
- check Peer Review and then Journal Article under Content Type to focus search hits to peer-reviewed articles
- check Law and Sociology and Social Interest under Discipline to focus search hits to those relevant to law and sociology
- Under Publication Date:
- move the scroll bar over to 2008 to present to focus search hits to sources with up-to-date research
3. I can't find anything on my topic. What do I do?
- The search words you're using to describe your topic may not match the tags that have been assigned to books and articles on that topic
- 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
- 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
- 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
