MC 3510 Political Communication Research: Searching Tips
How to Identify and Locate Sources
- Identifying and Locating SourcesThis tutorial will help you:
-Select research tools to search for the kinds of sources you need;
-Develop a search statement for targeted search results;
-Find these types of sources;
-Narrow or broaden your search results;
and much more!
How to Evaluate Sources
- Evaluating SourcesThis tutorial will help you: -Understand why evaluation is important -Determine what type of source you have found -Determine whether a source is scholarly or peer-reviewed -Determine whether a source is relevant to your research -Evaluate sources based on a variety of criteria
Searching Tips
Boolean Operators
There are three Boolean operators that are used to connect terms and tell databases how and what to search for: AND, OR, NOT.
AND is to combine terms, usually unlike terms/concepts. AND narrows a search. Example: social media AND teenagers
OR is typically used with synonyms and similar terms. OR broadens a search. Example: teenagers OR adolescents
NOT is used to exclude something. Example: teenagers NOT bullying
We use parentheses to help group parts of the search query, especially when we have several parts, and to tell the database the order of the query. Think about the search query as a mathematical equation.
All put together, they look like this:
social media AND (teenager OR adolescent) NOT bullying
Truncation & Wildcards
Truncation allows you to find different endings to a word. The symbol in many databases is: *
Example: teenage* captures teenager, teenagers, teenaged.
Be careful not to truncate too far into the word. For example: car* will capture car, cardiology, carbohydrate, caramel, carabidae, carassius, and thousands more words.
carbohydrat* would be a better way to truncate.
Wildcards are symbols used within a word to represent a letter for a variation on spelling. While not every database uses them anymore, for those that do, the symbol is often ? or $, though always best to check the database documentation.
Example: behavio$r captures both the American spelling, behavior, and the British spelling, behaviour