Have you already spent 20 minutes search 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 ISTD 4800: Capstone Seminar in International Studies. This is just a selection of sources that may be useful to you in this course. Contact your International Studies Librarian (Rebecca Hyde) with a question 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: “Arab Spring” searches for the phrase Arab Spring. Searching without quotation marks will search for Arab and Spring anywhere in the record.
Asterisk: democra* searches for democracy, democratic, democratization, 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.
