How To: Find Sources

It is important to thoroughly evaluate where you are getting your information, whether that be a book, research article, website, news story, or any other source. This process allows you to understand what is behind the information being presented so that you can make an informed decision about whether or not to accept or use the materials. These are the things to be looking for:

• Authority
  Who is the source of the information? What are their qualifications? What are their affiliations? 
• Accuracy
  Are sources given? How was it found? Can you verify statements using other sources?
• Purpose
  What is the stated or implicit purpose? Entertainment, commercial use, a conversational forum, advertisement, propaganda, informative, advocacy, outreach, scholarly research, education, or something else?
• Content
  What is being provided? Opinions, facts, subjective statements, objective statements, or perhaps a combination?
• Bias
  Is there a bias to the information or viewpoints being presented? If so, does it impact the accuracy of the information?
• Currency
  Look at how often the source is being updated; depending on the type of information, this may or may not be important.

For more information about how to evaluate resources for academic or other purposes, please see the Evaluating Source section of the How to: Academic Research guide.

A major source of frustration when trying to find resources is that you either get too many options, making it difficult to sort through them all to find what you need, or you don't find nearly enough about the topic you're interested in. Below, we have listed some tips and tricks designed to help you either expand or narrow your search results down.

Boolean Operators

Exact Words or Phrases

Put exact words and/or phrases you want in quotes. 
Example: Searching for "biological anthropology" will return results that specifically use that phrase, whereas searching for biological anthropology will return results containing either or both of those terms and those containing the exact phrase.

Using OR, AND, NOT and/or parentheses to combine or exclude keywords in your search

OR 
Use OR if there is more than one term that may be applicable and you want results for either of them
Example: "biological anthropology" OR "physical anthropology" will return results that contain either of these phrases

AND
Use AND to combine terms that you want to search; the results will include items with both terms
Example: "biological anthropology" AND forensics will return results that contain both biological anthropology and forensics; it will exclude any that do not mention both

NOT (or -)
Using NOT or a minus sign before the word(s) you don't want will tell the search function to look for results with the first word but will exclude any that contain the second one.
Example: "biological anthropology" NOT forensics will return results for biological anthropology and will exclude any that mention forensics

Parentheses ()
Use parentheses to separate search term strings; similarly to how math problems are done, everything within the parentheses is separated from the rest of the terms.
Example: ("biological anthropology" OR "physical anthropology") AND forensics will search for biological anthropology and forensics as well as physical anthropology and forensics

Number or Date Ranges

Ranges (..)
Number and date ranges can also be specified by putting two periods (..) between the numbers (including their unit of measure, if relevant), such as $150.00..$300.00 to return results showing those dollar ranges or 2001..2021 for results spanning those years.

Wildcard/Truncation Symbol

If you are looking for information about a keyword that may have alternate or multiple suffixes (for example: act, active, activate, activation), you can search for all of the options by adding what is called a wildcard symbol (? or *). If you search for act? or act*, it will return results for act, active, activate, activation, etc. If one option doesn't work, try the other; Google recognizes both, but not all search engines do. This technique can definitely be helpful, but be aware it may produce too many results.

Bibliography, Reference, and Works Cited Pages

Once you have found a scholarly article or book about your topic, check the list of sources that the author has used in their work. There may be articles or sources that you can use in your own research; you may also see trends in who is publishing prominently/frequently in a particular field, you can search for the author(s) to see if perhaps there are other articles they have written.

Subject or Keyword Listings

If you look at the subject listings for a book or article, you will see how the resource has been officially identified. You can click on these subject headings or use them as search terms to find other resources that focus on the same subject matter.

After clicking on a title in the catalog, you will see the subjects listed.

In listings from the main catalog, subjects can be found here:

In the EBSCO databases, the subject listings can be found here: