This tab suggestions some research strategies, helps with navigating this guide, and points to some great beginning tools.
One important thing to keep in mind/remember as you begin searching for resources is that a keyword search in any electronic resource (a library catalog, a digital library, a database, the internet, etc.) will point you to great initial resources, but you will not find all of the resources you need this way. It is therefore really important that you follow up on your initial searching by:
For places to search for books, click on the Books & eBooks Tab There is also a tab dedicated to Dissertations and Theses. Even though these are unpublished book-length works, they are often important sources of original information and their bibliographies can lead you to other sources.
To identify key journals, use the Journals (Online) Tab, and to locate academic journal articles, use the various databases listed on the Articles Tab.
The Films, Images, Maps Tab lists resources and methods to identify and access relevant films and images for your research.
Finally, the Assistance with Writing, Citing, and managing Citations tabs point to various tools to help you with writing and keeping track of the sources you use. The drop down Annotated Bibliographies and Lit Reviews is also helpful for such assignments and research related more advanced research, including theses and dissertations.
A few resources that serve as excellent Starting Point for many Anthropology Topics are listed below. However, PLEASE NOTE that for many anthropology topics, there are additional databases and search tools that may be equally important. DO NOT limit yourself to these!
A few Great Places to Start Your Research are Listed Here:
Oxford Bibliographies: Anthropology
Provides bibliographic essays and annotated bibliographies on a wide range of research methodologies, subjects, themes and theoretical orientations
Full Text of Journals published by the American Anthropological Association
Indexing database for anthropology, archaeology & related topics. Indexes articles in 2500+ scholarly journals, 1870 to present. Combines databases: Anthropological Literature (Harvard/Tozzer) and Anthropological Index (Royal Anthropological Institute)
Covers over 5,700 journals in the biomedical and health sciences and years covered late 1940's - present, with additional older medical literature selectively added. Search using keywords or the controlled vocabulary called MeSH. PubMed will automatically match your keyword terms to MeSH terms. For additional tips, see the Library's PubMed page.
Indexes over 18,000 journals in all subjects (coverage back to 1900 for science and social science journals), as well as 80,000 books and more than 180K conference proceedings. Includes the popular "cited reference search" to identify papers which have cited a previously published work or author. Can also sort by "times cited" and find related articles based on commonly cited works.
Sage Research Methods is an additional resource that may be very useful in developing your thesis. There are at least two ways to initiate your search for useful material and models for research and writing.
1) One way to begin is to select one of the categories of resources/information organized into boxes on the home page and then search within that area (such as case studies, reference material, or quantitative or qualitative methods
2) Another is to put keywords into the search box at the top
- the default order of the results will be by relevance; you can change this to title or publication date by using the drop down options from the Sort by: box
- you can also narrow your results using the faceting menu on the right: choose a particular format or kind of resource (books, reference materials, journal articles, datasets, case studies, video, etc.)
Sage Research Methods also includes a project planner, which serves as a guide to the stages of carrying out a research project (finding topic, reviewing the literature (of previously conducted research in this area), developing a researchable question, finding and gathering resources or data, writing, etc.) -- to use this, click on the "Design a Research Project" Box on the home page
Try one or two of the following strategies in the database you want to use. Not all of them are available in every database. Different strategies will change your results and help you target the articles you need.
Truncation is a search technique that broadens your search to include various word endings. To truncate your search terms, replace the word ending with an asterik *.
Limits provide database-specific recommendations for narrowing a search. Applying limits will filter out results that don’t meet your search requirements. This will save you time because you won’t need to look through pages of search results that don’t include the information that you need Each database offers different limits. Be sure to check them out to see how they can help you with your search.
For example: In the database, Historical Abstracts, you can filter your search results for peer review, publication date, document type, language, subject, etc.
The image below illustrates how applying limits will help you to narrow
your search results.
It's important to know that databases use subject headings to organize their articles. When you know the right subject headings for your topic, you can search more efficiently. Starting out on a new topic, you won't know the subject terminology. A simple way to find them is to start with a keyword search. When you find an article title that meets your needs, look for the subject headings assigned to that article. In most cases, those subject headings are hyperlinked and will take you to a list of articles with the same subject heading.
Scholarly articles often have extensive bibliographies, also called reference lists or works cited pages. Bibliographies include references to articles, books, and other relevant literature that were published before the article. Some databases provide links to the cited references so that you can look at those articles as well, which might provide more articles for you to use in your paper.
Cited References can help you find articles that are older than the one you are reading.
An Examplle:
Look at the example to the left. If you found a relevant article from 2003, you could look at the articles in the bibliography to see where your article got the information used to support their main points. These older articles can also be useful to your research, especially if you need to write a literature review.
You can use a similar method to find newer articles, by looking at the articles who have cited your 2003 article in their bibliographies. To find out more about this method, see the tab for Times Cited references.
Some databases, like Web of Science, include times cited references. Think of these as the opposite of a bibliography. Where bibliographies include references that are older than the article, times cited references are newer than the article.
Times Cited references can help you find articles that are more recent than the one you are reading.
An Examplle:
Look at the example to the left. Let’s say your professor doesn’t let you include references in your paper that are older than 2005. You are finding articles about your topic, but they are all too old. Even the best article about your topic was published in 2003.
Using times cited references, you could see which articles have cited the 2003 article. Chances are you will find one published a more recently that you could use for your paper.
When you find an article that you think will be a good to use, you can take advantage of “related articles” to find similar articles. Databases have different formulas for determining how an article is “related,” but it usually is a combination of same keywords and descriptors.
You can usually find a list of related articles on the results screen of the database.