Research for Writers: Research, Articles, & Databases

Be sure to use commands, called Boolean Operators, to further specify your search. 

• Be clear about what you need and eliminate any extraneous information or words. This means you don't want to type in full sentences or questions, just pull the key words or phrases (just like you would in academic databases). 
• Boolean Operators work in Google too. See the information above in "Quick Tip" to learn more about Boolean. 
• Think about who else would care about this information and how they (and therefore you) might phrase it. Looking for information on women married during World War II? You would want to search "war bride" or "GI bride" and not something like "women married during the war." 
• Don't know much about your topic yet? Start broad and work your way down. For instance, if you are researching the neighborhood of Greenpoint in the 1960's you might want to start by researching the neighborhood first. Run a search for Greenpoint, and then narrow down to your dates as you gather more information and can properly adapt your search. 

Information is created in different formats and at varying times. The formats are usually dependent on the time in which the information is being produced. This process is sometimes called the Information Cycle or Timeline. 

Some forms of information do not adhere to this timeline, but rather can be created or modified at any time (for example: social media posts or online encyclopedias).

For more detailed information on these formats see the TRU (Thompson Rivers University) Libraries Information Cycle page. 

For more information about utilizing resources from different time periods see our Primary Sources page.

We are indebted to the VIU (Vancouver Island University) Library Information Cycle page for some of this content.

Google, and more appropriately Google Scholar, can be valid places to search for articles and organizations. However, subject specific databases will have more advanced search options and articles. Here are some key differences between databases and Google.

If a database doesn't have the full text of an article you are looking for, you can copy and paste the title of the article into our catalog to see if we might have that item here. If we don't have it, request it through Interlibrary Loan (ILL).