Tips for the Writing 2 Research Paper
Professor Pecchenino
Winter 2007

This website aims to help you with the library component of your Writing 2 research paper. Professor Pecchenino will provide details about topics for your papers. The following will help you begin your research using UCSB library resources.

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 BOOKS

• Go to the Advanced Search screen
• Do keyword searches
• Use OR between similar concepts in the same box
  • Venezuela AND (democracy OR citizenship)

You can also use Melvyl (the library catalog for the entire University of California) if you don't find enough in Pegasus. But please note: it will take up to a week to get materials you find via Melvyl.

FINDING JOURNAL ARTICLES

Finding articles is a two-step process. First you start with an index to identify articles on a topic, then you locate the article. The indexes you need to complete the first step are found on the library's Indexes and Databases page. If you are off-campus, you will need to configure your computer to access the databases from home.

Depending on your topic you might want to search one or more of the following indexes:

Expanded Academic ASAP

• Contains citations, abstracts and some full-text documents for major journals in most academic disciplines
• Also contains popular magazines (for example, Time, Sports Illustrated)
• Go to Advanced Search
• Do keyword searches
• Limit to peer-reviewed publications
• Can use Boolean searching including parentheses
• Use * to truncate
• Use UC eLinks to see if we have the item

PAIS

• Contains citations and abstracts of articles relating to public affairs and international relations
• Do keyword searches in Advanced Search
• Use * to truncate
• Use UC eLinks to see if we have the item

Worldwide Political Science Abstracts

• Contains abstracts for scholarly journals in political science
• Do keyword searches in Advanced Search
• Use * to truncate
• Use UC eLinks to see if we have the item

Historical Abstracts

• Contains abstracts for scholarly journals and books on the history of the world except the United States and Canada
• Use keyword search box
• Can use Boolean searching including parentheses
• Use * to truncate
• Use UC eLinks to see if we have the item

FINDING NEWSPAPER ARTICLES

• Contains full-text newspaper articles and news transcripts (as well as other publications)
• Click on Guided News Search tab
• Select a news category: General News
• Select a news source: Major Papers
• Use ! to truncate
• Watch the date range settings (default is previous six months)