Taking the time to do background research is strongly recommended for a couple of reasons:
Keep an open mind as you start to look at the information and research about your topic. You are likely to come across new perspectives, questions you might never have considered, and detailed information you may not have seen before.
The internet is a great place to start looking for background information, especially for current events, technology, popular culture, and any other rapidly developing topics. Add words like causes, solutions, history, etc. to your search to get past simple definitions.
Books—especially encyclopedias—offer in-depth overviews and histories that can help you put your topics into context and find important nuances for your argument. Use tables of contents and indexes to jump through books to find relevant information.
Whether you're searching using OneSearch or another library database, there are certain strategies you can use to ensure you find the kind of information for which you're looking. When you use search engines like Google, you're able to type in whole questions or phrases. Library databases, however, are much more specific.
First, we select the main search terms that relate to our topic. The database works best with nouns. Eliminate any articles (of, to, is, with), adjectives (best, worst, good, bad), and most verbs (affect, change, alter, support).
Quotation marks are used to tell databases to search for words in a certain order. This is especially useful for specific topics that can't be boiled down to a single word.
This is also helpful when searching for the title of a specific source!
We then connect our search terms. This is what we'll actually type into a database search box. Search strings work best when they're limited to no more than four search terms—otherwise, your search will be too narrow!
Search Strings Using ANDWhen you connect your search terms using AND, the database will search for books, articles, and more which contain all your search terms. Search strings using AND narrows our search.
Search Strings Using OR and ParenthesisSearch strings using OR help us expand our search and find more results. Often, OR is used in conjunction with parentheses. OR on its own can often bring back too many results, so the parentheses help keep the database from bringing up off-topic resources:
Search Strings Using NOTYou may want to exclude certain concepts from your research. This can be done using the word NOT. Search strings using NOT help us narrow our search and find results that are more relevant to our topic.
If you're struggling with your searches, please contact a librarian!
Every source you find in your research should be evaluated, even if you find it in the library's collections or databases. Some sources might not be right for your project—too out-of-date, too biased, lacking citations to back up claims, and so on. To help you decide if a source is right for your project, we recommend using the SIFT Method to separate the quality content from the chaff.
What kind of source is this? Is it a scholarly article? Is it clickbait? Is it a helpful tutorial or an ad? Is this a press release about a study? There are so many different kinds of sources (of variable levels of quality) that it's good to know what you're working with.
This is also a point where you should check your emotional response to a source. Is this source trying to rile you up? Is it trying to persuade you? Does it challenge your perspective on your topic? A source that is only trying to elicit an emotional response is probably not a good source to use, while a source that pushes you to consider new information or a different point of view might be useful because it adds to what you know about your topic.
Who published this information? What are the author's credentials? What is this organization or publisher's mission? You can search online to find author bio information to find out about their education or professional experience. You can also look at "About Us" pages or search online to find out more about an organization or publication.
What are other sources saying about your topic? Does this new source fit what you know about the topic, and what others are discussing or reporting? Do other sources support or corroborate the claims made by the source you're currently evaluating?
Good sources will include breadcrumbs to the sources of their claims. This might be a link to the original study or the names of experts the author consulted during their own research. For scholarly articles, this means a list of sources at the end of the article that the author(s) quoted from and paraphrased. Some books will also have a list of sources at the end to point you to where the author(s) found their information.