Look for additional keywords in the research you find. For example, key people, places, events, and concepts.
Take a look at the references/sources cited in the useful books and articles you find and search to see if our library has access to these cited sources.
Subjects and keywords usually describe the main topic but not every topic covered. The subjects and keywords in database collections will describe what the article or chapter of a book is about allowing you to conduct detailed "needle in a haystack" searches. Subjects and keywords can be broad terms or more specific terms.
Example: Searching Hispanic Americans in a database may give you too many results on Hispanic Americans in general but too little information on Mexican Americans specifically.
Example:
Online research in library databases and the general internet is not always as simple as typing a topic and clicking the search button. Use the following tips to plan and refine your search strategy to find better and a more manageable number of search results.
Do not type in full sentences. Instead pick out the key phrases, words, and concepts.
Experiment with numerous keywords.
Use synonyms of words.
Example: Data and facts are other words for statistics and any of these can be used in searching
Combine multiple concepts using either the AND, OR connector.
Example: Country Profiles OR Country Reports
Example: Argentina AND Population
Search for your terms in either the keyword, subject, or abstract fields within a database search.
These advanced searching strategies are helpful in narrowing down your information results to a manageable number of relevant quality results.
Boolean Operators: AND, OR, and NOT may be used to combine key words in electronic database searching. Using Boolean operators can make you search more focused and yield more precise results.
Use AND to retrieve records containing only all search terms. AND will reduce and refine the results.
Use OR to retrieve records containing one, both or all of the search terms. OR will expand the search and retrieve more results.
Use NOT to exclude terms in a search. Be cautious when using NOT, useful search results may be omitted.
Phrase Searching. Some databases and search engines will allow the use of quotations to search for an exact phrase or words together in a paragraph or sentence. This also may be referred to as proximity searching.
Truncation is used to expand results by instructing the computer to look for the root of the word and all alternate word endings. The ? (question mark) or * (asterisk) may substitute for any number of characters at the beginning, middle or end of a word.
Examples: child* = child, childs, children, childrens, childhood
Use the help function for each specific database or search engine for more information on proximity searching.
The school and county libraries provide access to lots of helpful services and tools, including online database subscriptions to quality academic research not available by searching the general Internet.
Don’t spend all of your time on the general Internet.
Use general reference databases such a Credo Reference, Biography in Context, and History Reference Center to build background knowledge and gain more knowledge and understanding of a country, key figures, political/economic systems, events, and places.
Use journal article databases such as Academic Search Premier to find scholarly journal articles, published study results, transcripts from academic conferences, and primary sources from archives.
Spend the bulk of your research time searching library databases for quality research.
Don't limit yourself to just one database or one set of search results.
When conducting research, you need to be open to reading and sifting through lots of information to find answers to research questions, analyze the information found, draw connections between multiple resources, and bring new ideas on your subject matter to the surface.
Embrace the uncertainty of searching and use the trial, error, and retry method
Gather information from many quality sources on all perspectives of the topic
Be skeptical and demand verification by examining the author or sponsor of the information. Evaluate the source via the CRAAP Test.
Organize your information by common themes or contrasting perspectives on a theme to avoid be overwhelmed with information
Take detailed notes and create an annotated bibliography, which organizes and describes sources by topic, type of source, usefulness, or any other criteria that may help you along with complete citations for every source. For more info on how to construct an annotated bibliography, consult the Purdue OWL.