English and Literature

This page will provide you with some tips and tricks to make your research a breeze! If you still can't find what you need, please don't hesitate to contact the library! You can find our contact information and more on the Get Help page.

To get you started, here are some general search strategies:

Boolean Search Strategies

Use these modifiers in a general search in any one of our recommended databases or inside DragonQuest:

• AND – Pulls resources where all of your search terms appear. AND makes your search smaller.
• OR – Pulls resources where one or the other or both of your search terms appear. Using OR makes your search larger.
• NOT – Excludes a word from your search. Using NOT makes your search smaller.

Subject Database Strategies

Searching within different databases will broaden the range of resources available to you, especially as several specialized databases are not embedded in a general DragonQuest search. This is especially true of databases that do not include "EBSCO" in the "Alternative Name(s) & Keywords" field. The following subject clusters are a good place to start:

• Business
• Criminal Justice
• Education
• English & Literature
• History
• Humanities
• Psychology
• Science

The following image shows you how to see which subject databases are available to you by using the dropdown menu inside DragonQuest:

Narrowing DragonQuest Search Results

If you'd like to know how to narrow down your DragonQuest list to only full text, peer reviewed, or specific types of resources, we recommend the following tutorial: