LibGuides: FYSP 127: Race-ing the Environment: Home

Search Strategy

Here is a good, basic formula for getting started with your research:

Begin by narrowing down your topic and developing an initial research question.
Use the keyword brainstorming worksheet to help you tweak your research question, identify keywords and related terms, and keep track of what you find.
Search in a library catalog (Summon, OBIS, OhioLINK and/or WorldCat) to find books and reference sources. These sources will:
- provide BACKGROUND and CONTEXT
- REVIEW and SUMMARIZE earlier work
- help you FOCUS your topic and
- provide CITATIONS to important books, journal articles, conference papers, interviews, etc.
Next, search research databases to find articles. The library has hundreds of databases; those listed on this guide are good places to begin.
You may also wish to use Google Scholar to search the Internet. This is a great tool for doing cited reference searches.

Search Tips

Concept	Explanation	Example
Phrase search (quotes required)	search for an exact phrase (most, but not all, databases use quotation marks)	“death penalty” “standardized test” “reality TV”
Boolean logic (for keyword searching)	use Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) for more precise searching	See following examples
AND	search for records that have all of the words (narrows the search)	race and poverty drug use and educational attainment
OR	search for records that have any of the words (broadens the search)	homosexual or gay or lesbian or queer china or japan or korea
NOT	exclude records that have the word (narrows the search)	advertising not (TV or television)
Truncation	search for a root word with any ending (most, but not all, databases use an asterisk *)	adolescen* [finds adolescent, adolescents, adolescence]

Summon

Search approximately 300 million books, scholarly articles, newspaper articles, data, digital audio, digital video, digital images, government documents and more. It draws from the library catalog (OBIS), many of the full text and article indexing databases, as well as digital repositories from colleges, universities, research centers, and other open-access archives on the web.