BEFORE you sit down at the computer to start searching for books, articles, and primary sources, take a moment to think about WHAT you will search for.
Write down key words, phrases, names, and dates that might relate to your topic.
- Think about synonyms or words with related meanings. For example, women, females, wives
- Think about historical language as well as modern. For instance, African American would not appear in 18th-century documents, so also list terms like black, colored, Negro
- Put phrases (multiple words that need to be together in a certain order) inside "quotation marks."
HOW do you come up with the words to write down?
- Use your class textbook to help you get started.
- Read encyclopedia entries about a related person, place, event, or concept to get ideas for more words. Instead of using Wikipedia for this, search Reference Universe from the Library.
- As you find primary and secondary sources, see what language they use, and add new terms to your list to help you refine additional searches.
- Do a Google search to try and locate synonyms for the terms you're already using.
Make notes about how these words and phrases relate to each other, using AND, OR, and NOT to connect ideas (see diagrams below).
- Use OR to connect synonyms or words that could be interchanged: a source should have at least one. Example: cats OR felines. This finds MOREsources than either word alone would find ("or gets you more!").
- Use AND to connect separate ideas that need to co-exist; a source should have all. Example: "African Americans" AND "Civil War". This finds FEWERsources than either word alone would find.
- Use NOT to exclude irrelevant information that might be found by the same keywords. Example: cowboys NOT football. This finds FEWER sources than the first word alone would find.
