MATH 360 History of Math Class Guide

Look for ways to limit your results:

• Unlike Google, you are not limited to just a keyword search. In most databases you can narrow down your results by subject area, type of material, or date published. Date published is especially important in an area like health/exercise science where information can become dated very quickly.
• Explore the subject or thesaurus terms that are used by most databases. Since these are standardized, they allow you to find all the relevant information on a particular subject and weed out a lot of false hits.  This is especially helpful for databases pertaining to the sciences.
• Remember to use Boolean Operators to help make your search more efficient:
  • AND will produce results that contain BOTH terms (e.g. birds AND bees)
  • OR generates results that contain EITHER term (e.g. dogs OR canines)
  • NOT results will include the first terms, but not the second (cats NOT musical)
• Quotation marks will isolate that phrase: "natural selection" lists results containing only that specific phrase, but results for natural selection would contain natural AND selection somewhere, not necessarily side by side.

For more advanced search techniques, visit this guide.

Once you have an idea of what your keywords should be, decide on the database you should use. Recommended databases for this class are below.

For this assignment, you are looking to do research on a number of different aspects of your selected country/countries, including:

• history
• culture
• economy
• education

These are good examples of keywords that you would like to use for this assignment when you use them in conjunction with the name of the country. So a good search would be ["Great Britain" AND culture] or ["Great Britain" AND economy].

While you're searching, evaluate the sources to see how they can relate to the data analysis that you are doing. Do they help to contextualize your findings effectively?

General/Multidisciplinary Databases

Data-Specific Databases