LESSON ONE: KEEP IT SIMPLE, DATABASES ARE NOT GOOGLE!

Do video games portray women fairly?

Entering long sentence strings like this into Google will get you results

But trying this on the databases is almost always going to yield you zero or few irrelevant results.  Why? 

Therefore, we suggest trying the following techniques below to help maximize relevant results: keyword searches and truncation. 

Identify Keywords

Watch the short video.

a.) Write down your topic sentence / topic question:

Topic Question: Are video games biased toward women?

Topic Statement: Video games show a bias toward women.

b.) Cut out the ‘fluff’ words. Articles, prepositions, adverbs and even most action verbs should be left out.  

Example sentence:

Are video games biased toward women?

‘Fluff’ words crossed out:

            Are video games biased toward women?

c.) Now you have generated a useful list of essential keywords for finding resources!

            “video games”, biased, women

               “video games”                 bias                      women

Reminder: Use “quotation marks” for phrases that mean one single thing.

Synonyms: you can try synonyms for some of the terms if the results are too few or none by following your keyword with OR.

                bias  OR  prejudice  OR discrimination OR sexism 

**Avoid other non-essential fluff words that are obvious in your search: avoid adding words like information, research, article, peer-review, etc.

Truncation Expands Your Search Word Possibilities

When you search a term on databases, many of the databases will retrieve results with that word--because that is exactly what you asked for. Sometimes this can be problematic because we sometimes need more than what we think we need. 
Truncation is a trick that involves the use of an Using an asterisk (*) at the end of a word which (known as truncation or stemming), allows you to retrieve results containing all forms of the root word.  This is extremely useful if you find yourself getting fewer results than can help.

            Example: teen* will find teen, teens, teenage, teenager, teenagers, teenaged

Watch the short video below to find out more.

I want to truncate the word raci in order to get articles that may have the words racist or racism (raci*). Could this strategy backfire? How?

Example: Let’s start with the truncated keyword stereotyp*. What words can be retrieved by doing this?

Try this technique on OneSearch, or any of the databases.