WRPR 108: Real Work and Dream Jobs (HC) Spring 2024

kbrooks. Elevator. 2010. Via flickr.

Finding scholarly books and articles

The Trico's library catalog, Tripod, is a good place to begin your search for many kinds of sources, but perhaps especially for scholarly books and articles. Use the linked icons above to access.

Although for many topics you will find relevant results for a simple keyword search, its advanced search options often make the process much more efficient. To find this feature, click on Advanced search to the right of the Tripod search bar.

Specifying your search: search word location and material type

Let's say that you are looking for a book which will give you a broad sense of topics relevant to the labor movement in the United States. An encyclopedia specifically about the US workers' or labor movement would be helpful, if you can find one. To look for this, we could tell Tripod to search for books (and not articles or videos, etc.) with the word encyclopedia in the title, and the primary focus or subject of which is labor or work(ers).

We can indicate all these things in advanced search by entering the text and selecting the options highlighted below (just for example -- there are other paths to similar results!):

Logical terms and special search characters

In the example above, you will notice that there are several words joined by OR, namely labor, working, and worker. The terms AND, OR, and NOT all give the search engine specific instructions about what to do with the words you enter. We might call these logical terms insofar as they give instructions about how search words relate to one another, but you may hear them called Boolean operators (their proper name).

• OR instructs the database to look for at least one word that it appears between
• AND specifies that all of the terms joined with it must appear
• NOT excludes items with certain words in select locations from the search results

There are also certain special characters you can use in Tripod and many other databases that will make your searching more efficient. These include:

• Asterisks *
  • These give instructions to search for any set of characters following a set you specify. In other words, you can enter a part of a word, enter an asterisk, and get results which have various words with that common stem.
    • For example, in the search above, we could just search for work* instead of worker AND working. (However, this might also give us a lot of other words which start with work, like workshop, workplace, and so on.)
    • This can also be very useful in searching for terms which might have gender markings (or markedly neutral forms thereof), e.g., Latin* would retrieve Latina, Latinx, Latino, Latin@, and others.
       
• Quotation marks " "
  • Quotation marks indicate that you want results featuring the exact words you type, in that exact order. This is particularly useful for searching for quotes, titles of books or articles, specific phrases, and the like.
    • For example, searching for the making of the English working class could retrieve any number of varied results, perhaps bearing similar phrases or results with those words just somewhere in the text in whatever order, while "the making of the English working class" surrounded by quotation marks would strictly retrieve, say, the book of that title by E.P. Thompson, reviews of it, direct references to that title, etc.

Finding scholarly articles

You can use the techniques above to search Tripod for scholarly articles with only a few different selections.

In the Material Type drop-down menu, select Articles instead of books (or the other options). You can also search with the default setting, which will return results with all item types.

Once you have performed your article search, you may use the filter options on the left side menu to limit what is shown to only scholarly/peer-reviewed articles. To do this, select Availability > Peer-Reviewed Journals.

Once you click this option, the results will be updated automatically. Everything you see now will have been vetted by professional researchers in the relevant field, that is, scholars who assess whether it is of publishable quality for an academic journal. This is also a good way to find scholarly discussions or reviews of films.
 

Date filter

You may also find the Date filter very useful. This might allow you to find articles only from within the last several months, years, or historical ranges, etc.

The following are books some of your course readings are drawn from. These may be helpful when searching for other books, particularly in that you may use their subject headings to search for related works. Subject headings are used to put the library's resources into categories that reflect their primary content.

To find the subject heading, open the book in Tripod and scroll down to the field which indicates the book's subjects. The subject headings will be hyperlinked, and clicking on them will open a list of other items in our collection which have that classification.