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Search Basics
- Think critically about what kinds of contents different databases include, and adapt your search terms accordingly
- When using a given academic database, do a test search, open a record and see what descriptive language (metadata), the catalogers and indexers use to organize information. Adjust your terms accordingly.
- Use "" to search a complete, unbroken phrase, e.g. "Ni una más"
- In many databases, you can use * to stand in for the multiple possible endings of a word, e.g. mujer* (searches mujer and mujeres); union*(searches union, unions, unionized)
- Languages: most academic databases have filters by language if you want to exclude or include results in English vs Spanish vs Portuguese. Remember that databases run out of the U.S. will have metadata in English, even if the text itself is in Spanish or Portuguese. Copying and pasting text into Google Translate can give you a rough sense of the contents of an article in a language you can't read (but approach automatic translators with skepticism!).
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