Skip to main content

Information literacy - American studies: Introduction

Content

In this section you will learn how to search efficiently in the information sources you have chosen.

We will introduce you to the snowball method, the pearl-growing method and citation searches.

The various search options are listed in the chapter 'Search techniques and search tips' to help you search more specifically in the databases.

Each database has its own search options. In many cases you can search for specific materials (books or articles only). With the search techniques you will learn how to combine search terms with AND, OR and NOT, to include different spellings by means of truncation/masking, and how to search for exact phrases.

Learning outcomes

After studying this chapter you will be able to search efficiently and effectively.

You will be able to decide which of the various search methods is best for your research, and which search techniques will produce the best results.

You will learn to focus your searches, and this will save you time.

Search plan
https://libguides.rug.nl/c.php?g=502350&p=3438823
libguides.rug.nl
crawl=CC-MAIN-2020-34
49718
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:2FA6UQ326JDN4YNKJJZFNADQ4P6RZU2E
<urn:uuid:4038f124-6100-4e35-8508-3378bf248c4a>
2020-08-08T03:46:58Z
34.254.34.59
text/html
sha1:FVJHXLT75XDMDEXMMKFWEMCBIOZ7LD4L
<urn:uuid:675ae380-ddd7-4fd7-bb4f-4d995826a7da>
https://libguides.rug.nl/c.php?g=502350&p=3438823
response
<urn:uuid:3b49b985-30b3-4c24-86cf-aa13d6256cd5>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-34
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for August 2020
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-51.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.17 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/