History Research Guide
Using Keywords
It is helpful to break your topic down into keywords that you can plug into the databases. Searching with full sentences does not turn out well. Try something like this:
My research topic is how did disease affect soldiers in the civil war?
I would pull out my keywords and think of synonyms.
| Disease | Civil War |
| small pox | American Civil War |
| pneumonia | Civil War, 1861-1865 |
| typhus | |
| dysentery |
After you run your initial search, try to get ideas for other terms using your initial results. You can also limit your search results by the Subject terms you see listed under your article citations and rework your search! You can see from our results that the database refers to the Civil War as the American Civil War, 1861-1865.
Searching for articles in a specific Journal
If you want to search for articles in a specific journal you can use the search box to search by Journal Name, just select Journal Name from the drop down menu and enter the name of the journal you want to search. You can put the title in quotes to search for the exact title. Remember to take the full-text filter OFF if the journal is only indexed in the database.
