Do not wait until the
last minute
Rest assured that one
of these things will happen:
 Machines will break down,
Access to the INTERNET
will go down,
A database will be offline, etc.,
The materials you need will checked out, missing, or not owned by the
library.
If you give
us enough time, we can get a hold of just about anything.
 You might not be able to get
in touch with your professor. |
Define
your topic --
CSU information competency tutorial
Consult Reference Books
for ideas
Contact
your Professor |
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State
your topic as a
question.
For example, if
you are interested in Chicanos in higher education: You might ask questions such as:
How many Chicanos are enrolled in
colleges and universities?
What is the ratio of Chicano to Chicana
students? or
What subjects do Chicanos and Chicanas major in? |
Identify
the
main concepts
in your question
[see
also note on Chicano terminology]:
In the above
questions the main concepts are:
Chicanos, enrollment, and colleges or universities
Chicano Students, Chicana Students, enrollment ratio
Chicanos or Chicanas, subject majors |
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|
Not enough or no
records found? Broaden
your topic:
Try
truncating your search terms. (See below)
Broaden
the range of years covered.
Look
for synonyms for your terms. If the database has a thesaurus, use it
otherwise, try a print thesaurus.
Check
to see if there is another database that might cover your topic. |
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Advanced Searching
Tips: |
Use
Boolean search terms to link or exclude concepts related to your topic.
Separate your search terms with the
words AND, OR, or NOT
AND means both terms must
be included somewhere in the text;
OR
means either one must be included;
NOT
means one term must be included but exclude the other. |
Proximity operators
let you define the distance between two search terms appearing in a text.
Terns
that occur near each other have
greater relationship to each other than those that are distantly scattered
through out a document.
Choose terms that occur:
in
the same sentence,
in
the same paragraph,
within
two intervening terms, or within five intervening
terms. |
Truncation
lets you search more than one term with the same
root word.
Truncation
can help you to find out which form of a word is used most often.
Sometimes the only thing keeping you from finding resources is the presence
or lack of an "s".
econom*
will retrieve economy, economics, economies,
economists, econometrics, etc.
Do
not truncate common terms such as America*. |
Set building is a different type of search
strategy.
Search each concept in your topic
separately. Then combine the concepts using the databases search
history. This will help you see the number of times an
individual term or phase appears in the database. If there are
only a small number of occurrences, combining that term with other
terms will probably not find any results at all. |
| While you are searching,
always
be on the look out for other useful terms that could be used to
describe your search concepts including
the index terms assigned to an article. These index terms are often called
descriptors or subject headings. |
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A Note
about the terminology used for Chicanas/Chicanos |
|
You will encounter variation in the use terms
"Chicano" or "Chicana", "Latino" or "Latina", "Hispanic"
"Hispanic American" and "Mexican American" in different websites, online
catalogs and databases. |
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Regardless
of how you feel about the use of these terms, it may be necessary for you to try
all of them to find what you need for your research. A key word
search can help to
determine which terms have been used in the database you are trying to
use. |
|
In those databases with a
controlled list of vocabulary, "Chicano" or "Chicana"
will rarely be the term selected. Instead "Mexican
American" will probably be the preferred term. |
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U.S. government websites have traditionally used the term
"Hispanic American" in their reporting, but recently, the
Census Bureau allowed people to self select the terms used to
identity their ethnicity in the 2000 Census. Most government agencies have begun to use
some of these other terms. |
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