Latin American Studies Subject Guide

The majority of articles in databases come from scholarly peer-reviewed journals, but you should still critically assess your sources to ensure that they have been peer-reviewed.

1. Use main concepts as search words
   

   Your search words should be only the words that express the main concepts in your research topic. Words that don't convey main concepts should not be used as search terms. They can cause many useful things to be left out of your search results.

   
   

   Here are some types of words to avoid:

• question words like how, what, why


• words like a, an, the, in, from, about


• evaluative words like best, worst, positive, negative, advantage, beneficial, harmful


2. Try alternate search words
   

   Different words can be used to represent the same main concept. Be prepared to think of synonyms or related terms. They can help you

• adjust your search if you don't get good results at first


• find more or better results



Example: pollution OR degradation



3. Save time by using * to search for variations on a word

Example: Sandinis* = sandinista, sandinistas, sandinismo, etc.