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Civil Rights Movement in America (1950's and 1960's): Database Searching: Strategies and Tips

This guide provides resources that will enable you to critically examine the African-American's turbulent struggle for civil rights in 20th century America.

Identify Keywords

 

  • Break your topic down into concepts or parts
  • Pull out the nouns or the subject words (or phrases)
  • Ignore words like "the", "a"' , "in", "on" and words like these that are not specific to the topic

Use Synonyms

 

Think of other ways to express the ideas in your keywords.  Using related terms to express key concepts will increase your search results.

Examples:

capital punishment -- death penalty

equal rights policy -- anti-discrimination

air pollution -- smog

health --well-being

Boolean Operators

 

BOOLEAN OPERATORS  are words that connect search terms (or key words) to broaden or narrow the search results. 

There are three types of boolean operators:  AND, OR and NOT.

  • AND narrows your search results by limiting your results to those that contain both words connected with AND.

  • OR expands your search results by including results that contain one word, the other word, or both words.

  • NOT narrows your search results by limiting your results to those that contain the word you designate before NOT, but not the word after NOT.

 

Boolean Operator Venn Diagram

 

Other Search Options

 

Wildcard Symbol:  ?

This symbol replaces one character.  For example, the search for wom?n will find both women and woman.  Wildcards are used when there are unknown or uncertain characters in your search term.

 

Truncation Symbol:  *

This symbol is used to expand word endings.

  • government* will match with government, governments, governmental
  • technolog* will match with technologies, technology, technological

 

 

Quotation Marks:  "  "

Quotation marks are used to keep multi-word phrases together, as a unit, and in the exact order they are written.

Example:  "prescription drugs"

                   "plastic bags"

                    "environmental racism"

                    "civil liberties"

If we wanted to search for the term plastic bags, and did not use quotation marks, the search would retrieve results for plastic and results for bags, independent of each other.