Choosing a Research Topic:
Find a research topic. Your teacher may assign you a topic or you can browse through Encyclopedias, your text book or popular magazines for ideas. If you're still stumped ask your teacher for some ideas.
Limit your topic so your research is manageable
Topic: Cultural festivals and rituals
Ways to limit your topic:
Write your topic as a sentence
I would like to compare wedding customs between Christians and Muslims
Before you search your topic think of key words
|
Compare |
Wedding |
Customs |
Christian |
Muslim |
|
contrast |
marriage |
ceremony |
Catholic |
Islamic |
|
evaluate |
nuptials |
ritual |
Baptist |
Sunni |
|
examine |
|
tradition |
|
|
Boolean Logic
It's tempting to just plug your search topic (I would like to compare wedding customs between Christians and Muslims) into Google or article databases and see what comes up. But you get a much more accurate search by coming up with a search strategy. You don't have to use ALL the key words you come up with.
First apply Boolean Logic:
What broadens your search, what narrows it?
Using Boolean Operators write your search string:
(compare or contrast) and (marriage or weddings) and (customs or traditions) and (Christian or Catholic) and (Muslim or Islamic)
Academic Search Complete, first stop for the beginning researcher, is our largest multi-disciplinary database, offering thousands of full-text journals, as well as indexing and abstracts for magazines, monographs, reports, and conference proceedings. Most of the periodicals are covered back to at least the early 1990s, but some content dates back as far as 1887. The database features some content going back as far as 1867, with the majority of full text titles in native (searchable) PDF format. To cross-search additional subject-specific databases from this publisher, click on Choose Databases.
Anthropology Plus provides worldwide indexing of journal articles, reports, commentaries, edited works, and obituaries in the fields of social, cultural, physical, biological, and linguistic anthropology, ethnology, archaeology, folklore, material culture, and interdisciplinary studies. The index offers coverage of core periodicals in the field in addition to local and lesser-known journals.
