Humanities Search Skills   Tags: high, humanities, ib, school, sciences, social, students  

Research involves:

• Collecting Information about a subject from a variety of sources including books, journals, and the internet

or

• Carrying out experiments or talking to people and analysis of this information
  

Map out your search, start with major concepts:

• Keywords that describe your topic
• Alternate terms for your concepts and ideas
• Add sub-ideas and alternative terms
• Consider other spellings
• What ideas do you want to combine with your main topic?

Example: I want to understand the history of the arctic in Canada

Keywords: history, arctic, Canada

Alternate terms: Canadian history, arctic, northern, populations, Inuit

Sub-ideas: explorers, oral history

Other spellings: Inuit and Inuvialuit

Combine your terms: with the connector words  and or not

(arctic or northern Canada) and (history or oral history) not European 

You need to find out how to account for different forms of a word in each search tool.
- In many databases, the symbol is *
- In some databases, the symbol is $
- In the Library Catalogue, the symbol is ?