ENGL 10 (Baker, Summer 2024): Search Tips

The research process can be daunting. Where do you start?

You are already really good at finding information! However, academic research is not so much about finding specific answers, as it is a process of exploring the "scholarly conversation" and learning how other scholars are discussing your topic.

Research is an iterative process: your original research question may evolve as you dive into the scholarly literature and explore other approaches, theories, frames, and interpretations. 

Below are a few tips and strategies to get started and stay organized. See also these helpful tutorials.

• Brainstorm your topic: What sub-topics are you interested in? Are you looking at the topic through a specific lens, such as gender or race? Are you interested in the topic during a specific time frame? Are you exploring how a particular population of people connect to this topic? What are some keywords that you can use to describe this topic? Consider creating a concept map to help you brainstorm.

• Types of information: Decide what kind of information you're looking for. Different types of sources will offer different perspectives, and you might need to search in different places to discover these different types sources.
  • Books and Encyclopedias can offer broad overviews or historical context
  • Scholarly journal articles can offer empirical evidence or more focus on a specific intervention or population
  • Newspapers such as can offer societal context:

• Search numerous places: You can play around with different keyword combinations in UC Library Search, article databases, and Google Scholar.  A regular web search can lead you to recent news or advocacy organization reports on the topic.

• Use bibliographies to your advantage: When you find a book, book chapter, article, or other source that is useful for your project, take a look at the bibliography. It's very possible that many of the  sources that the author(s) used will be useful to you, too.

• Start a Bibliography page right away: By creating a Works Cited or References document right away, you can keep a list of all the sources you intend to use, and also be ready to include in-text citations as you start synthesizing your sources in your paper. Zotero is an excellent tool, but use whatever works best for you!

Databases don't like sentences! They are very literal and function by matching words exactly, and, unlike Google and other search engines, research databases won't offer alternative search terms and won't correct for typos and spelling errors.

It is up to you to think of all possible ways to express your research topic, and to spell everything correctly. 

• Brainstorm all synonyms and like terms and connect these with the operator OR. Example:
  • "climate fiction" OR cli-fi OR clifi 
• Use quotation marks to retrieve an exact phrase:
  • "speculative fiction"   "global warming"   "environmental racism"
• When you find a useful book or article, make note of the official subject headings or tags assigned to it and add these to your searches if applicable. 
• The asterisk (*) symbol will bring up alternate endings to words with a common root:
  • environment* will also retrieve environment, environments, environmental, environmentalist, environmentalism.
• Use the AND operator to combine separate concepts:
  • imagination  AND "climate fiction"
  • race AND "environmental justice" AND climate