Douglas D. Schumann Library & Learning Commons: Digitizing Women's Suffrage: Research Help: Searching

OPEN-ACCESS JOURNALS

Open Access (OA) Publishing is free and allows access to anyone. This means research is not hidden behind and expensive pay wall. Keep in mind that not every Open Access Journal is on the up and up. There are scams and shoddy research/reviews that get published in some OA journals. But there are ways for you to evaluate those OA journals.

Find an OA Journal a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.
Evaluating OA Journals helpful tools and discuss criteria to consider when choosing a publishing venue as well as tips for identifying and avoiding so-called predatory publishers, an increasingly common feature on the scholarly publishing landscape.
Retraction Watch a blog that reports on retractions of scientific papers and on related topics.

OTHER SCHOLARLY SITES

Women also know stuff Our searchable database helps academics and journalists identify and connect with women academics conducting research on a multitude of issues related to the study of politics.
Women also know history Our searchable website makes it easier to identify and connect with women historians working in a wide range of fields and professional settings.
Sourcelist Sourcelist is a database of qualified experts in technology policy from diverse backgrounds. It is built on the principle that technology policy stands to benefit from the inclusion of the ideas, perspectives, and recommendations of a broader array of people.
Cite black women Cite Black Women engages with social media, aesthetic representation (our t-shirts) and public dialogue to push people to critically rethink the politics of race gender and knowledge production.

Developing Search Terms

The first step in picking a topic is to brainstorm by asking yourself a few questions. What do you already know about this topic from your course readings? Are there similar ideas that you might want to explore? What are the key concepts that you're interested in pursuing?

Once you've spent a bit of time answering these questions, you can take the concepts you've identified and use the keywords and phrases to start searching for information. Keep in mind that you'll need to build a base of knowledge before you can write effectively.

Database Search Strategies

Once you've identified the keywords and phrases for your topic, you can start to search the databases for articles on that topic. For example, if you want to write about how women won the right to vote in the United States turn your topic into a keyword search like this:

Search One: (Search with keywords connected by “and”):
women and vote and United States

Search Two: (Truncate some of the keywords using *):
women and vote* and United States

Search Three: (Add alternate words into the search with “(or)”):
(women or female) and (vote* or suffrag*) and (United States or America*)

Truncate keywords where applicable. Truncation uses the asterisk (*) to end a word at its core, allowing you to retrieve many more documents containing variations of the search term. Truncation can also be used to find the singular and plural forms of a term. Example: educat* will find educate, educates, education, educators, educating and more.

Vote*	Suffrag*	America*
	Will Find:
Vote Votes Voter Voters	Suffrage Suffragette Suffragettes	America American Americans America's