Research Guides: ENG 112 Smith (Housing): Find Articles

Keywords & Search Strategy

You are working on your ENG 112 essay about a housing-related problem. This research guide can point you in the direction of resources that will help with your research. When using the Library databases it is important to think about keywords and your search strategy. Here are some steps to guide you:

Identify your thesis statement or topic sentence.
Brainstorm for keywords and synonyms you can plug into the databases (plugging sentences in to the databases usually doesn't work well)
Think about how you will plug the terms into the article databases. You might do something like the example below:
You can try using quotation marks for "phrase searching".
Use the filters on the left of your search results screen to narrow or broaden your search.

Focused Database Searching

EBSCO Social Science Databases

This group of databases includes magazine articles, journal articles and eBooks on a wide variety of topics in the social sciences.
U.S. Major Dailies (U.S. Newsstream- Proquest)
Provides access to five of the country’s most respected national and regional newspapers: the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.