This guide has resources covered in the library session for COM 1040 for your Persuasive Speech assignment.
Check out the Communications Research Guide or other Research Guides for more recommended resources.
An excellent place to start your research is to get a broad overview of your topic to understand the scope and possible resources. Encyclopedias are resources that have broad overviews of topics and there are specialized encyclopedias for different subjects or research needs. For example, your speech will be about a topic your classmates could be in support of or opposed to. Opposing Viewpoints in Context is an encyclopedia that breaks down both sides or views of a topic. CQ Researcher has encyclopedia articles on hot topics. Both provide summaries with links to other sources.
Newspapers and magazines are popular sources because they're written for the general public and do not have the same academic peer-review process as scholarly sources. These databases will help you find sources on how your topic is portrayed in the media.
1851 to date. Does not include Crosswords and Times Insider.
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The most commonly used operators are: AND, OR, and NOT. When used in all caps, search engines (Library Search, databases, and Google) recognize them as a specific function. These are best described by using Venn diagrams.
Click the tabs at the top of this box to learn more about each operator.
If you are researching social media but receive too many results about social media users or the social media site itself when you only want information on social media about the experience of influencers, you could use AND to make sure you only receive results with both terms in the item record.
If you are researching something with a name that varies depending on the context, you can use OR to make sure the system is searching all possible versions of that term. For example, some information on LGBTQ+ topics uses the term "LGBTQ" while "homosexual" is more commonly used in medical texts. If you want both, use OR to combine your terms.
If you are searching with a term that is part of a larger term not relevant to your research or that term is also used in a different field, you may need to use NOT to remove results. For example, if you are searching for the portrayal of witches in the media and use the term "witch," you may receive results about The Witcher, a book, video game, and Netflix series. To remove these results, use NOT.
To use NOT in Google searches, use - (minus sign).
Though some Advanced Search features of search engines allow you to have multiple search boxes with drop-down menus for Boolean Operators, you can use multiple operators in single line searches.
( ) Just like in math, parentheses are their own groupings. This part of the search is done before it is combined with any other part of the search.
" " Quotation marks make sure that two or more words are in that exact order or are found with that exact spelling.
* An asterisk functions as truncation. It can be used to find words with multiple endings. For example, teach* will search for teach, teacher, teachers, teaches, and teaching.
? A question mark functions as a wildcard. It can be used to find words where only one letter is changed. For example, wom?n will search for women, woman, womyn, and womxn.
Both of the searches above will function the same even though they are written differently.