ENGL 1A/2A: LEAD Critical Thinking & Writing (Michalski)

Pick a Database by answering these questions:

• Who do you want to hear from? Which disciplines would have done research in this area? Or, maybe you want to hear from folks working in a certain field? Perhaps librarians have something to say on that topic? Or oil & gas executives? 
• What formats are you going for? Books? Scholarly articles? Streaming video? Newspaper articles?
• Do you need current information? Or, are you wanting to search historically?

Construct/Compose a logical beginning search by:

• Deciding on the simplest, clearest terms for each concept/idea inherent in your research topic; and, then
• connecting the ideas with AND; and, then
• separating synonyms with OR; and, then
• truncating to pick up word variants; and, then
• enclosing any phrases in quotations.

For example the search pictured below is looking for material on how Muslims are portrayed in popular media:

Revise your first search by:

• Scrutinizing your search results looking for additional or better terms; and
• being especially attentive to the words appearing the Subject fields; and
• making logical use of the Boolean OR; and
• perhaps, limiting major concepts to the Subject field search (assuming you saw these words/phrases used as Subjects).

Using the example above, I would change my search like this:

Efficiently sort through your results by:

• Collecting relevant citations using tools of the database; and, then
• emailing yourself formatted citations; and, always
• utilizing the Find-It-@-SCU link to locate additional fulltext.