HIST 115 The World Since 1900 (Chhun): Find Scholarly Books and Articles

What's wrong with Googling your topic? Google gives you 25,000,000 hits when you look for your topic.

Is a database better? Yes! It's easier to focus your search to your particular topic and limit your results to academic research.

First of all, start with a strategy:

• Write the topic down in the form of a sentence or question
• Identify the key concepts of the question
• Try to think of at least one or two synonyms for each of these concepts
• If the database you are going to use has a thesaurus (index of subject headings), go there and search for the concepts and synonyms you have thought of. If related terms are suggested, review these, and possibly select and search a few.
• Search each of your concepts separately (you can have 2 or more related terms in a concept)
• Use the Boolean operators (and, or, not) to combine the results that you get in the previous step

If you are having trouble thinking of search terms, try making a table asking who, what, where, how, or when.

Results here are limited to books, ebooks, and book chapters.

Use the following databases to find scholarly and peer-reviewed articles on your topic