Education Research Guide

When you're doing research, think about your assignment. What is your argument? What do you want to write about? These things become your search terms (also known as keywords!)

If you're writing an essay to persuade your reader that Confederate monuments should be taken down, first you'll need to break down this argument into simple phrases, like Confederate monuments and taken down. You might be able to find some results if you type in the whole sentence, but search engines work best when you break your search down into keywords or phrases.

It's also helpful to brainstorm synonyms or similar words to your important words. For example, for Confederate monuments, you could also search Confederate statues or Confederate memorials. For taken down, you could use remove or destroyed. You'll find more relevant results if you try similar words!

If you're having problems thinking of similar words, do some searches and see what words the authors of the results are using!

Once you have some keywords, try some of these search techniques to get the best results!

• Use Boolean operators: these are words that expand or narrow your search by connecting terms:
  • AND makes sure both words show up in your search results, like "women AND girls" or "racism AND Trump." Most (but not all) search engines, like Google, do this automatically when you type something like "women girls" or "racism Trump" but you can add AND in to be safe!
  • OR expands your search results by making sure either word shows up in your search results. If you search "women OR girls," you'll get results with the word "women" in them, results with the word "girls" in them, and results with both!
  • NOT is great for narrowing your results; it makes sure the word after NOT doesn't appear in the results at all. If you search "nazism NOT Germany" you'll get results about nazism without the word "Germany" in any of the results.
• Phrase searching: if you're looking for a phrase with multiple words, it's helpful to enclose them in quotation marks to make sure that exact phrase is found in your results.
• Truncation: if you're searching for a term with a variety of endings, you can use an asterisk to include all of the possibilities in your results. For example, searching for child* would give you results with child, children, and childhood. (Another example is teach*: this gives you teaching, teacher, teachers, etc!)
• Wildcard: Wildcards are similar to truncation. If you insert the wildcard symbol, one letter will be replaced with a wildcard. This is useful for words spelled in different ways, for example: wom?n would result in women, woman, and womyn. Most often, a question mark is used for a wildcard, but this will vary by search engine.
• Advanced Searching: Be sure to check the "advanced search" page of whatever search engine you're using! You'll have the option to limit your results by date which is really helpful if you need articles from a specific time frame (like within the past 5 years.) The advanced search page also has many different options for you to try, like searching by author or name of journal.

Peer Review in 3 Minutes 

Doing Database Research at the Library

What happens if I can't read the full text of an article? 

If you're searching for sources for your assignment and come upon an article that you really want to read, but can't find the full text, don't worry! This video demonstrates how to check whether or not you have access to the full article through the GC library (and how to request it for free if we don't have it!)