The Libraries are here to help you with all your research needs! Librarians can help you develop your topic, locate resources for research, manage your citations, and so much more!
Have a subject-specific question? Use our directory to contact a Subject Specialist.
Beginning to do research on a topic can seem overwhelming at first, but there are many tips and tricks to finding the best resources for your topic. Some basic tips are:
Citation Chaining: The Before
Citations are important for many reasons, but they can also act as a treasure map for you when you do your own research. The process of looking through bibliographies and work cited pages for more resources is called Citation Chaining. Look through the citations for an article you've found and see if there are any new articles you'd like to find to learn more or use. This is one of the easiest quickest and easiest ways to find older articles about your topic.
Cited Reference Searching: The After
To find articles that build on previous research, you can do Cited Reference Searching, which will show you newer articles that cite resources you may have found, but are too old for you to use. Resources that can help you find newer articles on your topic are:
Ever searched Google for something and none of the results were what you were looking for? Databases and search engines sometimes need a little help figuring out what you mean when you perform a search. Using search modifiers can help you get the most relevant results as possible.
Below are some modifiers that can help you improve your search results:
| Modifier | Use it when... | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Quotes ("_") | You're searching for an exact phrase | "global warming" |
| AND | You need results with both or all terms | women AND hypertension |
| OR | You have similar terms you're searching for | student debt OR student loans |
| NOT | You don't want a term included in your results | endangered NOT birds |
| Truncation (*) | You want to include terms that all have the same word root | pollut* (will return results for pollution, pollutant, pollutants, etc.) |
Note: when you use AND, OR, and NOT, make sure you capitalize these modifiers. Otherwise they won't work.
Sometimes a database will have you enter your terms into separate boxes and select the search modifiers from drop-down menues. These work the same way as if you had typed the modifiers into the search box.
