GOVT 1101 (Fall 2023): It's Expensive to be Poor: Finding articles

• Start with just a few key words or phrases
• If you get a large number of results, you can add terms to narrow your search.
• Expand your search using alternate terms, e.g. (loans OR lending), (homes or housing), (finance or banking), etc.

What should I do if I can't find anything on my topic?

Some questions can be tricky. Ask a Librarian! We will puzzle it out together.

One advantage of this database is that it is already focused on the United States. To search, combine keywords and phrases and include alternate terms, e.g.,
rent*
[and] poverty OR poor people

Note: The asterisk (*) finds variant endings, so rent* finds rent, renting, rental.

Unlike America: History and Life, above, Sociology Source covers the world. This can be difficult if you're focusing on a single country. There are two ways to try to get around this:

1. Add the country name and use the drop-down menu to select Geographic.
   Note: This isn't perfect -- it will miss some articles that don't have a geographic tag -- but it can help to narrow your search.
2.  Add the phrase "in the United States" to your search. Place quotation marks around the phrase. 
   Note: In databases, prepositions are stopwords -- they are not searched, so this only works if that exact phrase appears in an article, but it’s sometimes helpful for finding more relevant results.

The Articles & Full text search from the library home page searches across a large number of article databases. Look for the filters at the top of the Articles & Full text interface.