- Wikis and blogs can provide a great deal of starter information, and often will have links to journal articles or authority sources. Reading blogs on your general topic can also help you come up with ideas for what you'd like to research.
- Using a wiki yourself can be helpful to manage your research (and even more so for group projects). PBWorks and WikiSpaces are a couple of (free) examples.
- Managing citations with free software can help save time in formatting your bibliography; The University of Arizona Library offers RefWorks for free and provides a guide to how to use RefWorks along with a FAQ.
- You can also more easily manage your sources with a citation management tool (a Firefox extension), Zotero. Zotero "
Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension
to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do
your workâin the web browser itself." Del.icio.us is another free tool for social bookmarking. Instead of bookmarking all the sites and webpages you would like to save only on one computer, creating a Del.icio.us account allows you to save your bookmarks so you can access them from anywhere. You also are able to share these bookmarks with others and add tags to describe what you are saving, making it possible to search by tag later on.
- When using databases, it can be beneficial to locate the thesaurus to choose the authoritative subject headings to search with -- this means the specific database catalogs journal articles based on what term they would fall under, with the terms being selected by the vendor who owns the database. This can make for a more efficient search strategy.
- Another tip for using databases is to skim the search instructions or tips the vendor provides. There can be variations between databases, so checking this out before getting deep into searching can help you.
Some general search tips: - Using AND & NOT limits your search, OR expands your search
- * (also known as wildcard) can be added to truncate words and get a greater variety of hits (for example: envir* could yield the results environment, environmental, environmentalism)
- The tutorials page should have some more detailed search strategy tips including those listed above. For Google searches, this page gives numerous tips that can be useful in Google Search and Google Scholar.
- If searching through the library catalog (as opposed to journal article databases), you can click on the call number and it will take you to a virtual bookshelf, showing all items surrounding what you originally found if you would like to "browse."
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