SOCI 160: Sex and Gender

Remember:

• Use a variety of keyword combinations when searching
• Limit to full-text and scholarly articles
• Try searching with examples
• Not finding anything? Try simplifying your search to the most important terms only
• Look at the subject headings
• Add "sociology" to your search terms to limit to sociology related material
• Try different databases
• Email yourself good articles

Search Tips

Use the tips below to improve your searches in the library databases.

Keyword Searching using simple terms or phrases

• Sierra Leone civil war
• carbon emissions

Exact Phrase Searching

• "colony collapse disorder"

The " " (quotation marks) means that the exact phrase will be used in your search; only items containing that exact phrase will be returned.

Truncation

• environ*

Returns all results containing words with environ as the root word i.e. envrionment, environmental, environmentalist, environmentally, etc.

Synonyms

• rich
• high income
• upper class

Using different search terms in your searches that mean the same thing or are similar in order to capture a wider variety of results.

Broad vs. Narrow

• undergraduate student (original term)
• university student (broader term)
• freshman (narrower)

If you find too many or too few results based on your searches, try broader or narrower terms to change those results.