Break your topic into keywords. For example, "I'm looking into the effects of violence on people under dictatorship."
Start broad with nouns. We can get more specific as we look at our results.
Looking at my results, I can see that the words "violence" and "dictatorship" are subject terms. Look what happens to my results when I change the dropdown box to SU Subject Terms.
Perhaps I want to look for articles about the effects on women particularly. I can add a third term, "women." I get 55 results. That doesn't mean that these are the only articles on this topic. I could change "dictatorship" and/or "violence" back to the default keyword ("select a field.") Or, I could take out the word "violence" and search just "dictatorship" and "women" and see what I get.
Or, I could add country names to my original search.
Sometimes you can get too narrow for a search. That doesn't mean that there is nothing on this topic, it is just that one of these terms may not be a subject term or is not used at all. That is why we want to keep track of what terms we search and how.
How could we change this search to get more results? Replace "dictatorship" with "Chile," for example, and see what happens.
Patterns to try:
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Online Access & In Library= Everything the library has online and physically.
Online Access=Excludes all print & physical resources (DVDs, print scores, etc.)
Peer Reviewed=Limits to scholarly articles. Be aware that this excludes book chapters/essays and books. |
Click the "cite" button in the righthand menu. A center box appears, where you can scroll and choose your citation format. Choose MLA. You can copy and paste the citation.
Always check your citation against the style guide. Capitalization might be wrong, or extra information or characters may be inserted. The database is plugging in data from the record according to an algorithm. It is up to you to know what you are citing!
