Women's and Gender Studies: A Guide to Research

Library databases have specific search functions and do NOT work like Google or other internet search browsers. Library databases require certain search logic to retrieve relevant sources. For example, all sources recorded in a library database are organized by subject terms. You can also search for words in the source. For example, if you search for the word "gender," you will have search results that have that word in the title, abstract, or text of the document. 

Finding keyterms to use can be challenging. A helpful tip is using a research question or topic to think of helpful terms that would be related to the topic you want to research. Let's start with brainstorming from a research question. 

Research question: What are women's experiences of workplace discrimination? 

Terms associated with the question: 

• women/woman
• gender 
• workplace
• work
• work environment
• discrimination
• bullying
• harassment 

Now that we have some search terms we can use to find related sources, let's begin using library databases to find sources!

Databases use precision searching and specific language to organize records, which means that we must use keywords, Boolean Operators (AND,OR, NOT), and limiters to effectively search in them. 

AND: Narrows search results. For example: Cat AND Dog will result in sources that have both of these words contained in them.

OR: Broadens search results. For example: Cat OR Dog will result in any source that has either of these words contained in them.

NOT: Excludes certain keywords from search results. For example: Cat NOT Dog will result in only sources that have the word cat contained in them. 

Truncation: Use an asterisk * to truncate and search for variations of a word, including plural forms. For example: immigrat* searches for the words immigrant, immigrants, immigrate, immigration

Wildcard: Use the question mark to represent more than one letter in a word, especially for words that do not form their plural by adding "s" or "es" and instead have different spellings. For example: wom?n searches for both women and woman. 

Phrases: Use quotation marks to search for words as a phrase rather than separate single words. For example: "undocumented immigrant" will search for these two words together as a phrase. This also helps keep your search results narrow and more focuses on the topic you are looking for. 

Example of using Booelan Search Logic in Milne Search:

(Wom?n OR gender) AND (workplace OR "work environment) 

Filters, typically located on the left side of the search results, allow us to filter or narrow down search results to fit a certain criteria and help us find more relevant results. 

Any search result will indicate the title, author, and type of source.