Gender and Technology: Using QuickSearch

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 game*" 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). 

The QuickSearch is the search engine that searches across resources owned and subscribed by the libraries. We created the following video tutorials on how to use QuickSearch.

-Getting Started with QuickSearch  (video: 4:39 min.) 

-Saving Searches and Results (video: 1:55 mi.) 

-Finding Course Reserves (video: 1:28 min.)

-Accessing your Library Account (video: 1:02 min.)

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