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GNED 500: Global Citizenship

Welcome to Centennial College's GNED500 research guide. This guide will introduce you to the resources needed to successfully complete your papers and assignments.

eResources

Use the databases below to find articles from magazines, newspapers, and journals.

A complete list of library eResources will help you select appropriate databases for your research.

Search Tips & Tricks

Keywords

Keywords are short, descriptive words that describe the big ideas behind your research question. A library database is a bit different from a search engine, your keywords need to be specific to your topic to ensure you get the best results. The short video on the right (2:30) from McMaster University explains.

What makes a good keyword?

Look to your research question or assignment details for inspiration. Nouns generally make good keywords since they are about specific people, locations, or things. Keywords should be about the subject matter/main ideas of your research and can be a word or a short phrase. Usually 3-4 keywords will give your search the right balance of specificity.

WORDS TO USE: Groups of people impacted by the topic (e.g., students, women, newcomers, teenagers), key concepts (e.g., environment, artificial intelligence, mental health, social media), and/or locations make for great keywords.

WORDS TO AVOID: Avoid words like "impact", "effect", "challenges", etc. These words are too broad and will flood your result list with irrelevant resources.

Sample search

Head to the Advanced Search page and use a separate box for each keyword. You can add additional boxes clicking the " + ADD A NEW LINE" hyperlink.

Research question: How does social media impact teenagers' mental health?

Keywords: Teenagers (key group), social media (concept), and mental health (concept)

Synonyms

Synonyms are words that have the same, or nearly the same, meaning as the main keywords. Synonyms and keywords are interchangeable, which means that the meaning of your search will remain the same but your scope will be more broad. Using synonyms is a good way to capture extra results that are still related to your original topic.

Research question: How does social media impact teenagers' mental health?

KEYWORDS Teenager Mental health Social media
SYNONYMS Adolescent, youth, minor Anxiety, depression, self-image Social network, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat

Sample search

In the database, add your synonyms in the same box as their responding keyword (example below). Connect keywords and synonyms with a capital OR (see Boolean operators tab for more info on this).

Boolean operators

Boolean operators are a set of commands that you can use when searching databases (they also work in search engines like Google). Using Boolean operators in your search can help you narrow or expand your search as needed. The three most widely used Boolean operators are AND, OR, and NOT.

AND:  Use AND to join your keywords. Using AND will also narrow your search since it requires the database to find resources that contain both keywords. If using Advanced Search, ANDs will automatically be added if you use a separate box for each keyword. For example: “mental health" AND teenagers.

 
OR: Use OR to connect your synonyms. Using OR will broaden your search since it will look for either one of the synonyms or keywords. Example: "mental health" OR anxiety OR depression.
 
NOT: Use NOT to exclude certain words, i.e., when you are looking for one term not the other. Example: teenager NOT child.
Boolean operators can be used in the main search box:

 

Or in Advanced Search: 

 

Quotation marks

Use quotation marks to search for an exact phrase. This tells the database to only give you results where the words appear exactly as you've typed them. Use quotation marks for short phrases like "mental health", "social media", "climate change", etc. Quotation marks can be a very effective way of narrowing your search results.
Check out the example below:
A search for social media, without quotation marks, yields over 3 million results.
Screenshot of a search showing the results of a search for the phrase, social media, without quotation marks showing 3.4 million results.
 
Adding quotation marks around "social media" lowers the results from 3.4 million to 609,000, removing millions of irrelevant resources! This simple trick can significantly narrow your search results, streamlining your search and saving you valuable time.
Screenshot of a search showing the results of a search for the phrase, social media, with quotation marks showing 609 thousand results.

Alternate endings and spellings: Truncation & wildcard

Truncation

If you are searching for a word that has many endings (e.g., education, educator, educational, educated). You could be missing valuable resources if you only use one version of the word. Truncation means to shorten a word; adding an asterisk ( * ) to the end of the root of a word will search for all the variations of the word.

Example: Educat* will search for: education, educate, educator, educational, etc.

Wildcard

You can also use the asterisk as a "wild card". When used this way, the asterisk will search for alternate spellings of a word. 

Example: Wom*n  will search: woman, women

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