The searching techniques below will help you to find things faster and rethink what you might be looking for.
Coming up with keywords to enter into databases can seem easy — you use Google every day after all — but with library databases you often have to be more strategic about your vocabulary. While your research question might be quite specific, you don't want to be too broad or too specific with your keywords.
Things to consider when developing keywords:
One of the best ways to find the scholarly conversation is to see who others are citing and track down those articles. Look at bibliographies. Look at who the Wikipedia page is citing. Then check the catalog to see if we have that journal or book.
Often times we might think that we need a source that argues for the same thing in order to legitimize our own argument, but that's not true. What that means is that your paper has already been written! Instead, you'll often have to research around a topic, particularly if what you are researching is very recent or very specific. You may need to create a conversation of scholars around an adjacent topic that is either broader, around a different location, or a different time.
Here's an example for the research question: "Why are the Mrs. Roper Romps happening at this point in our culture?"
Chances are I'm not going to find any scholarly journal articles on this very topic as it's a recent event reported on by the New York Times. I would be better served thinking about sources focusing on things like drag culture, women in drag, the TV show Three's Company, contemporary feminism, queer culture, the co-opting of queer culture. Then I take these scholars and put them in conversation with my topic. They do not have to say anything about my very specific topic, but rather a bigger aspect of my topic.
In the catalog, if you find a book that looks good, scroll to the bottom of the record. You'll see subject terms that you can click to get more material on that particular subject. You can click on the beginning part of all. The hyphens in the term delineate different parts of the term.
AND | OR | NOT
These are boolean operators that allow you to add, combine or exclude terms.
AND: Results must contain both things. Narrows results.
OR: Results can contain one or the other. Broadens results.
NOT: Results should not contain these terms. Excludes results.