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GSWS2715: Sex Wars in the Americas: Home

Primary Sources on Gender and Sexuality

Latin American Studies Materials

Data Sets and Public Opinion Surveys

Your Librarian

Education Policy

Religion and Conservatism

Tips for Effective Searching

When selecting keywords , consider:

  • What are the most clear and concise terms or short phrases that describe your topic or question.
    • Phrases should be limited to two or three words and be placed within quotation marks. This will tell the computer to search for those words together and in that order. Searching for “South America” will find works about South America specifically, while searching for South America will find works that contain the words South and America, but they may appear anywhere in the text and not necessarily together.
  • When searching for words that may have different endings, such as sexuality you can use an asterisk (*) to include all of the endings. For example if you search for ethnograph* you will see results that contain the words ethnography, ethnographer, ethnographical, etc.
  • Try different combinations of the terms you choose and consider synonyms and alternate terms
    • Combining multiple search terms using AND will give you results that contain BOTH  of the specified terms. This can help LIMIT results.
    • Combining multiple search terms using OR will find materials that include wither of your terms, but not necessarily both. This can help EXPAND results.
    • Combining multiple search terms using NOT will exclude materials that use a specific term.  This can help LIMIT results. **Be thoughtful about what you might accidentally exclude!**
  • Adjust your search based on our results depending on what results you see.