Gender and Technology: Finding Articles

STEP 1: What is your research topic? 

It is useful to formulate your research topic with a question:

• Why are women still under-represented in the field of computer science? 
• Is there a relationship between violent video games and violence?
• Does companies have any retention policy for women or minorities? 

STEP 2: What are the main concepts?

From the question you formulated, select the words with content:

• under-representation and women in science
• video games and violence
• retention policy and women and employment

Ignore the words such as still, relationship, between, and any because they link concepts. The words with content are the ones you will use in your search. 

STEP 3: Develop alternative terms or keywords.

• women in science -- under-representation
• women scientists -- under-representation
• women in technology -- retention 
• digital media -- violence 
• video games -- violence 
• working women -- employment -- retention
• women employees -- recruitment and retention

STEP 4: Use Boolean connectors "AND" "OR" to combine your search terms

AND narrows the search: 

• women in science AND under-representation
• working women AND retention AND employment

OR broadens the search: 

• women scientists OR women engineers
• video games OR digital media

Use quotes to make sure the phrase stays intact (use single quotes depending of the database)

• "women in science" 
• "video games"

1. You can use the search box on the libraries main page and type in the keywords to search. You retrieve journal articles, newspaper articles, reviews, and e-books.

2. You can also go to specific databases, the ones that are most productive for your topic. The following databases are recommended for topics on gender and technology. Click here for a complete list of individual subscription databases.

Academic Search Premier

ACM Digital Library

ComAbstracts

Communications & Mass Media Complete

CQ Researcher

Factiva

GenderWatch

Using truncation is a good way to broadening your search. The majority of databases the truncation symbol is asteric (*). The truncation symbol directs the database to search for all words that contain the root with variations of the ending.

Examples:

• Mother* retrieves Mothers, Motherhood, Mothering
• Tech* retrieves Technology, Technical, Technologist