Search Tips
Use these search strategies to help you find useful information quickly and effectively:
Quotation Marks for Phrase Searching
Let one good book or article lead you to others. Scholarly publications almost always have bibliographies or lists of works cited. Check these out! If the original source is useful to you, works used by the author may be valuable, too.
You can also see how a particular book or article is categorized and look for other works in that category.
Check out these searching tutorials for more information:
Finding Information
Once decided on your topic and you're ready to start hunting and gathering information. Finding information is not difficult; the challenge is focusing your search enough to find useful information.
What makes information useful?
Useful information will answer your research question, is appropriate for your assignment, and is from a reliable source. You don't want to waste your time gathering a bunch of irrelevant, unreliable information that you can't use in your paper.
To be sure you don't miss the very best book, article, or Web document on your topic, you need to search in a variety of sources.
Visit the following pages for more about finding information:
Research Guides
Our Research Guides (LibGuides) were created to assist you with finding resources in your subject areas or for your assignments. Use the tabs across the top of the page of each guide to locate information and recommended resources as well as tips to make your research more efficient.
Each tab provides links to useful information and help searching for a book, in the databases and on the web. Our LibGuides will enable you to access quality information and avoid plagiarism by correctly citing the sources you find.
As always, if you need help, ASK!
Choosing the Right Source
Choosing the right source for your assignment will ensure that you are searching in the right place for relevant, reliable information that meets your instructor's expectations and fulfills your assignment requirements.
This video from the University of Texas, Arlington Libraries will show you how to select the right sources for your assignment:
