Skip to Main Content

Coastal Carolina logo

UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

POLI 200: Intro to Political Science

This guide will help students in POLI 200 locate sources for their annotated bibliography and research paper assignments.

Ask the Library

POLI 200: Intro to Political Science Library Guide

In this guide, you will find:

 

  • Links for searching the library's book collection, which includes both books and ebooks.
  • The recommended library databases for locating scholarly articles in your discipline.
  • How to schedule a research appointment or get more help through chat, phone, or email consultations with librarians.
  • Links to pages that will help with APA style and other sites that can help you with citing sources.

Keyword Strategies to Consider

Search Strategy: Examples:

Consider abbreviations, alternate spellings, and alternate terms.  Try variations of your search terms to see what works best.

If the term has been translated, are there spelling variations depending on the translation used?

ISIS or Islamic State (are there other names sometimes used?)

EU or European Union (Try searching individual member countries, too.  Or to broaden your search a little, try Europe instead)

US or USA or United States, etc.

 
Truncation: use an * to stand in for word endings in order to broaden your search results searching for recruit* will return results with the words recruit, recruiting, recruitment, etc.

Broad vs. specific keywords -- try both

Communication tools (or just communication) would be a very broad keyword search.

Specific keywords related to communication tools might be: cell phones, smart phones, text messages, texting, computers, internet, social media, social networks, Twitter, Facebook, Skype, Snapchat, etc.  

 

Subjects: Political Science
Tags: politics