Research Guides
It often helps to begin by brainstorming a list of keywords relating to your topic. Sources from your background research can be a good source for keywords. You can also save your list and revise it over time as you learn more through your research. Which terms have been most helpful? As you identify new helpful sources, are there other terms you can add to your keyword list? Don't forget about synonyms, and broader, narrower, and related terms.
These search tips can be applied to almost any database or search engine.
Boolean operators connect your search terms together to either narrow or broaden your set of results. The three basic operators are AND, OR, and NOT.
Use AND in a search to:
For example: chamber music AND Fanny Mendelssohn AND reception
Use OR in a search to:
For example: Fanny Mendelssohn OR Clara Schumann OR women composers
Use NOT in a search to:
Truncation is a technique that broadens searches to include various word endings and spellings. To use truncation in a search, enter the root of a word and put the truncation symbol at the end. The database will return results that include any ending of that root word.
For example: child* = child, child's, children, children's, childhood
Phrase searching allows you to specify that adjacent words be searched together instead of as single words. To do this, use parentheses or quotes around search words.
For example: "African-American composers" will search for this as a phrase, instead of searching single words that may be unattached in the results.
The bad news is that there is no one perfect place to search that will have everything you need for your research topic. The good news is that as a UW student, you have access to a wealth of specialized databases that index the scholarly literature.
Library databases provide the ability to focus searches by subject area, sort results according to date and relevance, and will never charge you to access the full-text of an article. Google Scholar provides some basic and advanced search options, like a library database. However, it doesn't have the ability to focus searches by subject area, nor does it consistently provide the full-text to materials. In some cases, Google Scholar is a great option for finding scholarly materials because it's a familiar search engine that provides easily-accessible information on citations trails and can link to the UW Libraries for obtaining full-text.
When using Google Scholar, it is possible to directly access full-text material already paid for by UW Libraries. To view subscription-based content through Google Scholar, you will need to add University of Washington Libraries to your Google settings. To learn more about how to do this, visit the UW Libraries' Google Scholar Research Guide
Some of the research databases available through the UW Libraries, like JSTOR, are multidisciplinary and index many different subject areas and disciplines. Depending on your topic, it may be helpful to search a multidisciplinary database. Multidisciplinary databases with music coverage are listed on this page.
Many of the research databases available through the UW Libraries, like Music Index, cover specific disciplines or subject areas. You can find a list of music-specific databases on this page.