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Religious Studies

Background Information

The Fulton Library has many books about the LDS religion and its history on the fourth floor in section BX 8601-8695, but these dictionaries, encyclopedias, and handbooks can help you with background research for your research questions.

Search Tips for LDS Studies

Searching for articles and books about the LDS faith can be tricky because there are many different ways that researchers and authors refer to this religion. In addition to the usual search tools like using AND and "quotation marks" to search for different terms, using OR and (parentheses) is a very useful search tool for finding all relevant materials. Here's how OR and (parentheses) work. 

OR

This tool tells the database to find at least one of two or three words. This tool is the best way to search for synonyms without having to try an entire series of searches: 

  • "Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" OR "latter-day saints" OR  Mormons OR "Mormon Church" OR LDS

(Parentheses)

OR is often paired with parentheses so you can use multiple searching tools in the same search. OR on its own can often bring back too many results, so the parentheses help keep the database from bringing up off-topic resources: 

  • women AND ("Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" OR "latter-day saints" OR  Mormons OR "Mormon Church" OR LDS)

Truncation

Another search trick allows you to find word variations. For example, if you want to find research about LDS people, you might need to search for the word Mormon. But authors might also use the word Mormons or Mormonism. To catch all of these, you can use truncation. Just remove the parts of the word that are different from each other and add an asterisk (*).

For example: Mormon* will find Mormon, Mormons, and Mormonism. 

But note that if you shorten words too much, you'll end up with too many irrelevant results.

Periodicals

Use the following publications to either search for articles in your research or to keep up with research about the LDS religion. Once you click on a link, you'll arrive at the landing page for the publication. Click on one of the links under full-text access to see issues of or articles from the publication.

Library Help

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