Below are some strategies for more effectively and efficiently when searching Tripod, JSTOR, and other sites.
Boolean Operators:
Use Boolean operators (e.g. AND, OR, NOT) to search for multiple terms simultaneously. Make sure you use all caps for the Boolean operator.
For example: "19th century" AND painting
Phrase Searching:
When searching for a specific concept or phrase, put the phrase in quotations to search for this exact phrase. Phrase searching is particularly helpful when you get too many unfocused results or your terms are generic. For example try "gender identity" in quotation marks to search for the phrase rather than gender and Identify. "New Media" will pull up more focused results than if you searched for new and media.
Nested Searching:
To pair two or more words keywords with another keyword, try using a nesting phrase. This is helpful to search for multiple synonyms at one. Put the keywords in parentheses connected by a Boolean operator.
For example: (woman OR female) will return results that match at least one term.
Add another keyword or nested phrase connected by a Boolean operator.
For example (textile OR cloth) AND “South Asia”
(sculpture AND polychromy) AND Medieval will require all key words to be present in the search results.
Many catalogs or databases will have an "advanced search" option, which provides multiple search bars to facilitate nested searching.)
Truncation and Wildcards:
Most catalogs and databases enable users to search variations of keywords by using truncation (*) or wildcard (e.g., ?, $, !) symbols.
For example, one could search for cloth* to find cloth, clothes, clothing, and so on.
Wildcard searching works similarly: a search for t??th will return results for teeth, tooth, tenth, and so on.
Knowing where to search is just the first step. Once you’ve found databases on your topic, you will need to be able to do effective searches.
The University of Arizona Libraries has a short tutorial on effective boolean searching.
NCSU Libraries also has this brief video on refining your search strategy:
Looking up sources from the bibliography of a relevant article, or looking up other sources that cited an article once it was published, are both good ways to trace the scholarly conversation on your topic over time.
Library databases, Google Scholar and other site often have links that make it easy to do this – look for links like “Works Cited”, “References”, “Related Articles”, “Cited By”, etc.; Here is a brief video tutorial from NCSU Libraries finding cited references in Google Scholar: