The Department of Applied Arts and Sciences offers courses to fulfill an Associate of Arts (A.A.) degree.
Use your NetID and password to access library databases off campus.
Digital news archive from NewsBank that provides access to thousands of global, national, and local news sources. Coverage dates vary by publication. To explore available titles and their date ranges, use the A–Z Source List.
Published 44 times annually, delivers comprehensive and impartial analysis of political and social issues. It features regular reports on a broad spectrum of topics, with full-text archives available from 1923 to the present.
Continuously updated full text collection of over 1,300 general and subject specific titles from 121 publishers with particular emphasis on encyclopedias, dictionaries, atlases, and reference handbooks.
A news platform exploring controversial social issues and current events, featuring balanced pro/con perspectives, reference materials, interactive maps, infographics, and more.
Brainstorming keywords will help you refine your topic, find the most information about your topic and save you time by helping you search databases in a more efficient and systematic way.
(Why? Different authors will refer to the same concept in different ways. Having a comprehensive list of keywords to search will help you find more relevant information.)
1. Pick out the main ideas in your research question. For example, the main ideas in this research question are in bold: “How does legalization of marijuana affect mental health rates in the United States?”
2. Take each of your main ideas and brainstorm as many synonyms, related words, acronyms, initialisms and spelling variants as you can. For example, for "United States":
3. Do this for each of your main ideas. Searching all the variants you can come up with will give you a broader selection of relevant information. Consider making a chart to keep track of which combinations of keywords you have searched for.
4. Know that there is no such thing as a perfect search. Searching is a process, so having a list of potential keywords will help you begin your research. You’ll find that different combinations of keywords will bring up different results in different databases. You can still learn something from every search you perform, so know that this list of keywords can continue to grow throughout your research process.
You can also use what you learn from searching to redefine your research topic or question.
5. Several other specific search techniques can help you use your brainstormed keywords. Take a look at:
Questions to guide the development of your research question:
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