Research for Writing 2ACE
Professor Pecchenino
Winter 2008

Your assignment:Write a 4 to 6 page research paper that explores the current system of government and political goings on of a country other than the United States.

GETTING BACKGROUND INFORMATION ABOUT YOUR COUNTRY
A good place to start researching basic information about your country is U.S. Department of State publication called Background Notes. Here you can find fairly up-to-date basic information about the country's history, political organization and economy. Use this source to stimulate ideas for topics or concerns relevant to your specific country.

DEVELOPING YOUR SEARCH STRATEGY

Before you start searching, you need to think about what you are looking for and how it might be described by someone else. For this example, let's look at the question "What rights does the press have?" and apply it to Venezuela. To research this, you might come up with these terms:

(rights OR freedom* OR libert* OR oppress*)
AND
(press or journalis* or media)
AND
Venezuela*

There is a lot going on in this search. We connect similar terms with OR and then enclose these in parentheses to establish them as sets or concept clusters. Then we connect these parenthetical sets with AND to see where the concept clusters overlap. This is called searching with Boolean operators and can be done with many (but not all) of our databases.

The asterisk* used above in journalis* is a truncation symbol. This means that the computer will search for words that start with the letters j-o-u-r-n-a-l-i-s (journalist, journalists, journalism, etc). Most databases have a truncation symbol and most use the asterisk*.

Finding Journal Articles

From the Library's home page, select RESEARCH then ARTICLE INDEXES & DATABASES to access the following select databases.
To access these databases from off campus, you must go through the Off-Campus Log-In.

Selected databases

• Expanded Academic ASAP
• Historical Abstracts
• Alternative Press Index
• JSTOR
• PAIS International
• Sociological Abstracts
• Worldwide Political Abstracts

The can search the following newspaper databases to articles about your country of choice:

• Ethnic Newswatch
• New York Times
• Los Angeles Times
• Wallstreet Journal
• LexisNexis Academic
• Newsbank

In the advance search field enter Keyword Burma Keyword Political rights and Keyword women.

• Use the " " to search a specific phrase as it appears on the document, (e.g. "human experiments", " medical apartheid","syphilis study".)
• Use OR to combine terms when either one will do: Burma or Myanmar
• Use AND to force the results to have both terms: military AND war
• Most databases let you truncate by using a symbol to get other letters: cultur* gets you cultural , culture, culturalise...
• The truncation symbol can be a *, ?, ! or other symbols depending on the database

Use Pegasus to find books on your topic. The UCSB catalog will also tell you if the library has books regarding your topic. You can do a basic keyword search or a more specific search. Selectthe Advanced Search tab.