ENGL 399: Early Modern Ecologies (Biggie)

Here are some general tips to guide you in choosing your search terms:

- 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 subjects are listed for them and try to build keywords from there. 

• Try a broader search. For example, if you can't find enough resources on your specific work of literature, branch out -- look for resources about the author, the genre as a whole, or important themes. 
   
• Try a different database.

Unlike Google and other web searches, which scan the full text of documents from beginning to end, the library catalog, and some of our research databases, scan mostly metadata, or information about the documents they contain -- titles, abstracts, subject keywords and other info. This is why searching for sentences or entire phrases does not work well in library resources.