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.
This course page was created for EAS 4930 - Collaborative Community Development: Homelessness and the Housing Shortage with Professor Bob Lewis. This is just a selection of sources that may be useful to you in this course. Contact your course librarian (Rebecca Hyde) with questions or to make an appointment for an in depth research consultation. For quick and/or general questions you can also use our 24/5 chat assistance to get help with your research!
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: “housing shortage” searches for the phrase housing shortage. Searching without quotation marks will search for housing and shortage anywhere in the record.
Asterisk: Homeless* searches for homeless, homlessness, 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.
Trace the Literature: Use an article’s reference list to find additional articles & use a citation database/index (like Web of Science or Google Scholar) to find a list of more recent articles that have cited a given article.
Multi-disciplinary interactive online mapping and visualization tool that provides access to data, including, demographic, spending, housing, quality of life, economy, health, and more.
News articles can provide helpful contemporaneous information and analysis of current events.
