This course page was created for students in POLS 4730/5730 Seminar: Contemporary Political Ideologies with Dr. Wynne Moskop, Fall 2022. Contact your Political Librarian (Rebecca Hyde) with questions or to make an appointment for an in-depth research consultation. For quick and/or general questions you can contact Rebecca or use our 24/5 chat assistance to get help with your research!
Some databases will include the full-text of articles, but others will include the 
button which links to full-text when available and if not available, gives you the option to request articles for free through Interlibrary Loan's Illiad service.
Keep track: Keep a list of the databases and search terms you used, that way you'll know what you already tried and where you had success!
Quotation marks: “social justice” searches for the phrase social justice. Searching without quotation marks will search for social and justice anywhere in the record.
Asterisk: feminis* searches for feminism, feminist, feminists, etc.
Question mark: wom?n searches for women and woman
Save what you find: Use a citation management software (like EndNote or Zotero) or other method that works for you to keep track of articles and books you find.
EndNote and Zotero are citation management tools that allow you to create a customized library of all of your references, to insert citations while you're writing, and to auto-create bibliographies.
Have you already spent 20 minutes searching and you feel like you're hitting a wall? Stop what you're doing and contact your librarian!
Research takes time, and when you're working on research for a paper you might spend hours researching and try many, many searches before you're done. But you shouldn't spend hours searching and finding nothing. If you spend 20-30 minutes on your research and you're not finding anything remotely relevant, please stop what you're doing and contact your librarian! I can help you develop search search strategy, and maybe choose another database more suited for your topic.
