Weatbrook

Topic Selection

Follow these steps to select a research topic: 1. Choose any topic or topics that have to do with Environmentalism. – “e.g., Global Warming”

2. Be a little more specific about your topic. – “e.g., effects of Global Warming on the oceans”

3. Be a lot more specific about your topic – “e.g., effects of Global Warming on plant life in the oceans”

4. Repeat these three steps three or more times to give yourself a few examples of topics to choose from. When you have a few examples, choose the topic that you feel meets your course requirements, the needs of your intended (or imagined) audience, and/or has the most relevant source material to support it.

If you are struggling to come up with a general topic check out the databases below for some ideas.

Search Terms

Steps to creating good search terms:

1. Have a well-formed research question
2. Extract core terms from this research question
3. Brainstorm a list of alternative terms or phrases for each core term
4. Organize the list of terms and phrases by creating a hierarchy, indicating broader and narrower terms for each core term
5. Identify which terms you would combine to conduct a search

Google Tips

• If you aren’t getting the search results you want change your keywords. Make them more specific or less specific, use synonyms, or rephrase.

• Use quotation marks to search for an exact phrase.   

         e.g. “Wolves of Yellowstone” will only return search results with that exact phrase

• use search term  site:domain to pull up websites with only a specific domain

          e.g. wolf site:edu will only pull up .edu sites with “wolf” in them. You can do this for all domains, .edu .org, .gov. 

• Adding ~ before a word will search for its synonyms.

         e.g. ~energy will search for energy, electricity, fuel, and power.

• Add a dash (–) before a word or site to exclude all results that include that word. This is especially useful for words with multiple meanings, like Jaguar the car brand and jaguar the animal.  e.g. jaguar speed -car

New York Times Access

You must have a Salt Lake County Library Card to access this database. If you don’t know how to acquire a card please come talk to the librarian Ms. Bates. 

Go to the Salt Lake County Newspapers page–> click “Proquest Newsstand”—> Type in your library card number—>Click “Publications” located above the search bar-–>click the link that says “International New York Times”—> Scroll to the bottom of the page to search within the publication or select an issue by year and month.