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| Smith, Clint. How the Word is Passed. Little, Brown & Co., 2021. |
Whether you use the Internet or a library-based research tool, developing a list of keywords and phrases describing your topic is a good way to organize your thinking and increase the relevancy of your searches. The following tips will help you adjust your keywords and further refine your searches.
- Keep things simple, especially when using library databases. Describe your topic using two or three simple keywords. If you don't get good results, remove a keyword or try using another term with a broader meaning. For example, instead of searching for a phrase such as, "water crisis and exploitation of Black Americans in Flint Michigan" try "water AND Michigan." If you end up with too many results, add another simple keyword or two. Here are a few search terms that might be helpful for this course:
- Capitalism
- Colonization
- Corporate power
- Discrimination & Race Relations
- Discrimination against people
with disabilities
- Ethnic minorities & multicultural
studies
- Exploitation
- Marginality, Social
- Minorities
- People with disabilities
- People with mental disabilities
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- Poor—United States
- Poverty
- Race discrimination
- Racial justice
- Sex discrimination against women
- Social discrimination & inequality
- Women—Violence against
- Working class—United States—Economic conditions
- Working Poor
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- Consider synonyms. A synonym is a word that has either the same, or almost the same, meaning as another word. Try to come up with more than one way to describe your topic. Remember, authors and librarians may use different terms and phrases to describe your topic idea. For example, the keywords, "injustice," "inequality," and "exploitation," might each be used to get at a reasonably similar concept.
- Use "official" subject headings and descriptors. When you search in a library database, note the ways in which librarians and indexers describe the books and articles most relevant to your topic. Once you figure out what these "official" terms and phrases are, immediately narrow your searches by using these linkages to limit your results to ONLY things that include your subject heading.
