Veteran and Active Military Support: Tutorials and Study Aids

You can use these searching tips for your classes.

• Article databases and the catalog don't recognize phrase searching, so break your topic into the main keywords or concepts.  For example, if your topic is the effect of the serf emancipation on Russia's political structure, don't type "the effect of the serf emancipation on Russia's political structure" in the search box.  Instead, type in "'serf emancipation' AND polit* AND russia" or something similarly structured.
• Try to think of as many different ways to describe your topic as you can.
• When you find a good article, look at their footnotes or endnotes to see what articles the author read--you might find a few good ones that you can use. 
• Use truncation to expand your search results, for example, if you type in "polit*" it will capture politics, political, politicize, etc.  Some databases do this automatically, but many do not. 
• Click on linked author names, subject headings, or any other descriptive terms in book and article descriptions.