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Public Policy 400 (Capstone)

Reminders!

Brainstorming is your friend! There is ALWAYS more than one way to express an idea or approach a research topic. Think for a few minutes to identify:

key concepts and ideas (women and sports)
synonyms and related concepts (female, girls, athletics, etc.)
broader concepts (gender)
narrower concepts (teenage girls)

Use truncation (*) to get variant spellings and multiple endings of words (theatre/theater, labor/labour, teach/teaching/teacher/teachers, etc)

Use the "subjects" or "thesaurus" tab in many databases to identify better ways to describe your topic.

Tips & Tricks

Thinking Like a Database
From the good folks at UMass, this short (less than 5 minutes) video will help you learn to think like a database, which is surprisingly different than thinking like a human.

Search Smarter, Search Faster This link opens in a new window
This 7 minute video from the University of Sydney provides an interactive way to learn about developing a search strategy from a topic. It's funny, and the narrator has an incredible accent. Also includes talking dinosaurs.