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RELS 233: Households & Early Christianity (Johnson Hodge)

Fall 2023

General Search Tips

Constructing Your Search

In general:

  • Use keywords or brief (2-word) phrases instead of sentences -- one or two for each part of your topic.
  • Use concepts and other nouns as your keywords.  Think of words that are likely to be used in titles (or that you have seen in titles).

If your keywords aren't turning up many results, you may need to:

  • Try thinking of synonyms or other ways of phrasing your topic. If you can find one or two relevant articles, check to see what subject keywords are listed (or look for other clues in the text) and try to build keywords from there. 
  • Try a broader search (broader topic, broader date-range, etc.).
  • Try a different database.

What Am I Searching?

Research tools tend to function in one of two different ways. 

Some tools -- Google and other web searches as well as certain databases -- conduct what is called a full-text search, which scans every word of the document(s) being searched from beginning to end. 

Others, including the majority of our research databases and the library catalog, conduct what is called a bibliographic or metadata search. These tools scan only the metadata, or descriptive information about the documents they contain -- titles, abstracts, subject keywords and other info. This is why searching for sentences or entire phrases often works poorly in the research databases, and why Google produces so many more matches. 

So which do you choose? 

A bibliographic search will bring you fewer results, but will be tailored to results that mention your terms in the descriptive information (and therefore, are more likely to be relevant). 

A  full text search will bring you a greater number of results, but more of them are likely to be irrelevant (for example, if your search term appears only once in the document in an off-hand mention). However, it might catch some articles that you might not see otherwise, and may help you find articles whose bibliographic information uses different terminology to describe your topic. 

You may want to experiment with tools that conduct both kinds of searches, to get the widest range of resources on your topic. 

(Secondary) Research Databases

Religion

Atla Scripture Search

Atla Religion's Scripture Search allows you to search for articles flagged as pertaining to a specific scripture passage.  There are several different levels available. For example, if I wanted to examine John 3:16, I could search for all articles pertaining to the Gospel of John; all articles pertaining to Chapter 3 of the Gospel of John; or all articles pertaining to John 3:16, specifically. 

Note that articles are not always labeled accurately or comprehensively -- it's a starting point! So, if John 3:16 doesn't produce enough results, consider backing up to look at John Chapter 3, or, if necessary, the Book of John. Or, try taking out any specific search terms you may be using, look at all articles pertaining to John 3:16 regardless of theme/topic, and then narrow from that point. 

Here's a quick video to show you what it looks like: 

History & Archaeology