Popular Culture for Composition

Database Searching

Cortland Memorial library's databases each have special features.  The common way to search each database is by keyword or by subject

• Keyword searching allows you to enter any word or string of words. The database will search for all occurrences of the word(s) in citations, abstracts, and depending on the availability, full-text.
• Subject searching will provide more specific results: controlled vocabulary (subject headings or descriptors) that the database uses, rather than keywords.

Keyword Searching Tips

• Use your main terms rather than asking questions or full sentences.
• Use quotation marks around a phrase or set of terms ("death penalty" rather than death penalty).
• Use Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT
• Truncation: use * at the end or middle of a term to retrieve variations of that word. For example, “child*” will return hits on child, child’s, childhood, children, etc. The search “wom*n” might retrieve woman or women.
• If you have too many results, use limiters such as Date of publication and Type of publication
• If you have too few results, try changing your keywords to synonyms, or removing any limiters.
• Avoid checking the Full Text limiter.  An article may be in full text in another database, and you will be linked to the full text.

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"Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature." (About Google Scholar)

1. Sign into Google Scholar. Then, on the upper left corner of the screen click the Menu iconfollowed by theSettings icon.

2. On the left/top, choose Library Links. Search for "Cortland" and choose the SUNY Cortland - FullText@SUNYCortland.

3. Click Save.  

More information

To find articles on specific topics, start with an article database that covers many subject areas. Searches in databases like Academic Search Complete provide citations and/or full-text articles.

Subject specific databases are especially good for in-depth research about your topic.