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International Development Studies: 2. Searching

Brainstorming Keywords

The Keyword Searching tutorial looks at choosing search terms and planning a search.

1. What is Keyword Searching?
Learn how to have better results with more focused searching.
2. Preparing a Search
Learn how to think critically about your subject terms to express the most important concepts in your search
Combining Terms - Keyword Searching Tutorial
Part of the Keyword Searching tutorial, this section covers combining search terms using AND & OR.
4. Truncation and Wildcards

Resource Selection

Visit the tutorials below to find out how to use Omni to find articles, books, films etc. OR specific indexes to find journal articles.

Omni Guide
A guide for using the Omni search tool.
Finding Articles

Other Useful Tutorials

Searching for and Evaluating Sources
Academic Skills Centre, Trent University
Tutorial: Scholarly Articles
Scholarly articles: what they are, how to find, recognize, read, and use them. Includes exercises. Estimated reading time: 20 minutes.
Navigating From a Citation to A Document
Finding E-Books
E-books are available from a variety of publishers in many different ways. This page outlines strategies for finding e-books.
Tutorial: Evaluating Websites
When you're searching the web for information, know how to evaluate the reliability and usefulness of websites. Estimated reading time: 10 minutes.