Before Searching

Research is a lot of work. Your searches may not initially yield favorable results, or upon finding some sources you might come to find that you need to rethink your research question. This can be really frustrating, but understand that it is a completely normal part of the process!

To help you conduct your research more efficiently and effectively, it is important to consider what exactly it is that you are searching for. What types of primary and secondary sources do you want? Are there any interpretations that you are interested in learning more about, or perspectives that you want to incorporate? Do you need a certain amount of sources? 

Approaching your research with the answers to these questions in mind will help you to navigate through the sources that you find!

Keywords

In addition to considering what you are looking for in sources of interest, it is important to come up with keywords that you will use when searching for sources. Keywords are terms or very short phrases that describe or represent the main topics or concepts of your research question. These are the terms that you will put into the search bar of the Waters Library's databases or OneSearch, to find sources of interest.

• You will also want to consider historical language in addition to modern language, as terminology for certain concepts or topics might have evolved over time.
• For any phrases, make sure that you put them within "quotation marks." This ensures that the phrase is searched with the words in that particular order.
• Finally, consider some synonyms to these keywords. Historians might use more than one word to describe a certain topic or concept.

Additional Tip: If you are struggling to come up with keywords, refer to your class's course readings, lecture videos, and notes. These are good places to start looking for terms used in your area of historical research. 

Selecting a Database

1. Go to the Waters Library Homepage.
2. In the center of the page, you will see a search bar, with different tab options. Select the Databases option.
3. Under the search bar, select, Browse by Subject. Scroll down to History.
4. Read through the summaries under the link of the databases listed under History, to determine which databases would be best to conduct your searches in.

Combining Your Search Terms

Now that you have prepared what sources you want to find, the keywords you want to use to conduct your searches, and the databases you want to look in, you can start searching! 

Many databases use what are called Boolean operators (AND, OR, and NOT) to establish relationships between your selected keywords to limit, broaden, or define the search results. 

AND 

Using AND will narrow your search by only pulling up results that include BOTH keywords.

OR

Using OR will broaden your search by pulling up results that include EITHER one of the keywords or BOTH of the keywords. OR is also a great Boolean Operator to use when you have a certain subject or topic that has several similar terms to describe it.

NOT

Using NOT will restrict your search results by excluding the term that directly follows NOT. This is an excellent operator to use when your search results are pulling up a lot of irrelevant results (perhaps a keyword has multiple meanings; you can use NOT to specify which definition you DON'T want included in the search results).

Search Precedence

The way you search with Boolean Operators MATTERS. Most databases will search keywords that are linked with AND first. This means that if you have any terms linked together by OR that you want to have searched first, you will need to group them together within parentheses (). Otherwise, the two words connected by AND will be searched first.

Example: ("Great War" OR "World War 1") AND trenches

Additional Search Tips

Truncation (also known as using the Asterisk *)

Putting the asterisk at the end of a word stem will search for any words that include that stem, but that have different endings. An example is farm* (this will search farm, farms, farmer, farmers, farming, etc.).

Quotations

Using quotation marks allows for you to search a short phrase in the exact order you write it within the quotation marks. If you don't do this with the phrases you search, the words making up the phrase will be searched separately.

Just how many keywords can I search with in one go?

Finally, when you start searching, pick out two or three keywords to initially search with. If you start off using five or six keywords, the search results might be too narrow, or you might not get any search results at all! Starting off broadly and then slowly narrowing down by adding an additional one or two keywords ensures that you are not missing out on any potential sources of interest.

Search Filters

Filters galore!

Once you have conducted your initial search in a database, you will see that there is a list of limiters, usually running along the left side of the screen. These range from options to only search through peer-reviewed articles, selecting a date range, all the way to limiting by what country the article was published in (limiters may vary by database). 

These filters are a wonderful way to further narrow your search results down to the most pertinent to your research.