Research Guides: SO330 Race & Ethnic Relations: Intro

Search Tips

Tip 1 Boolean Operators: To search the catalogs and databases highlighted in this guide you will need to use Boolean operators (ANDs and ORs), quotation marks, and truncation to pull up books and articles on your topic. Here is a brief overview of how to use Boolean operators and truncation:

AND: use AND to link together search topics (turkey AND secularism)
OR: use OR to link together synonyms or like concepts (religion or islam*) AND (iraq or syria)
*: use truncation to pull up the root of a word with variant endings (kurd* will bring up kurds, kurdish, kurdistan)

Tip 2 Brainstorming: Take a minute to brainstorm all of the ways that a geographic region, event, or population can be referred to, then group those synonyms with the OR Boolean operator. For example:

palestine OR "palestinian authority"
pashtun or paktun or pathan
"arab israeli conflict" OR "gaza strip" OR "west bank"
"middle east" AND (ethnic* OR nationalism)

Introduction

This is a guide to selected sources of information related to SO330 Race and Ethnic Relations. These resources will help you complete the Group Research Project which requires you to research race and ethnic conflict in the Middle Eastern countries selected by Prof. Smith.

This research assignment requires the use of scholarly peer-reviewed research resources. If you need assistance is determining whether or not sources are scholarly peer-reviewed articles or if you need help in locating information or using library databases please contact Gwen Verkuilen, the Sociology subject librarian.