WRIT 141: The Novel of Manners

This guide provides some useful starting places and strategies for doing research for this course. I'm happy to consult with you on any aspect of your research, from developing a research question to finding, evaluating, and citing sources. Email me or make a calendar appointment!

- Karen Storz, Research & Instruction Librarian

Specialized encyclopedias, handbooks, dictionaries, and other reference works can be good starting places for getting an overview of a topic, biographical information, definitions of key terms, and suggestions for further reading. Search or browse one of these individual books, or search across multiple books using one of the reference collections at the end of the list.

Reference Collections

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These tips work in SuperSearch and most databases.

Use quotation marks " " to search words as an exact phrase. This will narrow your results.

"gilded age"

Use AND to combine multiple concepts in your search. This will narrow your results.

"child rearing" AND "gilded age"

Use OR to find sources that have either keyword or phrase. This will expand your results. Group these related terms in parentheses, so the database interprets them first. The following search will find results that have any one of the terms in the first set of parentheses along with any one of the terms in the second set.

("child rearing" OR motherhood) AND ("gilded age" OR "progressive era")

Use an asterisk * to find variant endings. This will expand your results.

("child rearing" OR mother*) AND ("gilded age" OR "progressive era")

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