Catalysts for Change: Home

Whenever you are doing research it is good to get an overview of your topic. Use the Encyclopedia databases below to better understand your topic. Pull information and keywords from the articles found in these articles to guide your searches in other sources. NOTE: These are starting points only!

TRUNCATION

Truncation lets you search for a term and variant spellings of that term. 

Just add an asterisk (*) to a word with multiple endings:

EXAMPLE: interact* will search interacting, interacted, interaction, and interactivity

BOOLEAN SEARCHING

For more precise searching, connect your keywords in a meaningful way using the words AND, OR, and NOT.

Using AND narrows your search.

EXAMPLE: 

The more keywords you connect with AND, the fewer results you will retrieve. The database will need to find each of your keywords in the text in order to show it to you.

EXAMPLE: "homeless youth" AND "education" AND "new york city"

Using OR broadens their search. You should get MORE results using this strategy.

EXAMPLE: water OR lake OR river OR stream

Using NOT narrows your search.

This type of search is good to use when you already know what you DO NOT want.

EXAMPLE: (cars OR automobiles) NOT Europe.

QUOTATIONS

Sometimes you may want to search for a phrase. Using QUOTATION MARKS around a group of words will search the phrase as a whole instead of by individual terms. 

EXAMPLES: 

"common cold"

"primary school"

"community college"

Noodletools is our citation generator. Used correctly, it will format your citations for you and ensure you get full credit for providing your sources.