ENGL 1410: Crime and Punishment: Home

Is the print book you want already checked out? Check Prospector to request a copy from a library nearby!

Search the title in Google Books. Some books are at least partially scanned; use the 'Search in this book' feature to find the context. It can go a long way to alleviating potential headaches!

Keep in mind, if you do make a request via Prospector, we don't have teleportation (yet), so expect it to take 3-5 business days to arrive.

Keyword Mapping

Here is an example of creating search terms (keywords) based on a broad research topic. 

Truncation

Using a (*) on a root word will try to find multiple endings and variations is on that word. For example, searching [surviv*] will bring up results that have the word(s): 'survivor', 'surviving', 'survive'.

Phrase Searching

Put quotation ( " ") marks around a specific set of words to force the database to find the words together or in a particular order. For example, putting quotations around ["new religious movements"] forces the results to prioritize results that have that as a phrase together rather than results that have "religious" and "movement" separately.

Boolean

The default 'and' & 'or' help create a search string.

• AND is used to connect two different search terms that you want to force the results to have
  • [ cult AND trauma] will only return results that have both words (or their variants)
• OR is used to add depth & synonyms to search terms; it will bring in results that contain one or the other term
  • [cult AND (children or adolescents or youth)] will bring up results that mention 'cults' and at least one of the other terms (child, adolescent, or youth); this helps if one study describes 'children', while another calls them 'adolescents' or 'youths'.

Google Scholar: "cited by __"

Try copy-pasting the title of an interesting article into Google Scholar to find other articles that cited it. One word for this is "citation chaining" or "citation tracking".

OneSearch:  Web of Science

When you're using OneSearch you might notice that a item has "Web of Science" and a number next to it. This is another way of citation tracking/chaining.

Scopus: "Related articles" and "Cited by"

You can also put the title into the database called Scopus (though you might need to create an account if you haven't already). This database is also great at helping you see citation chaining and other article metadata.

Which article is scholarly?

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