Librarians are available to help guide you no matter what you're looking for:

• Email us to ask a question or get more information.
• Phone a reference librarian.
• Visit a reference desk to talk with a librarian.
• For help from another student, visit RWIT, the Student Center for Research, Writing, and Information Technology.

Need more specific help for your topic? Look at Resources by Subject for a guide to the key information resources in your subject area, written by reference librarians. These guides recommend the best library resources for your topic or discipline, and contain tips on how to use them effectively.

• Narrower, more specific concepts. If your topic is broad ("federal funding of the arts"), try to focus on a specific aspect of that topic ("federal funding of painters through New Deal programs and the Works Progress Administration")
• Additional search terms to make your search more focused. Searching "radioactive waste disposal AND Yucca Mountain" will find fewer, and more specific, results than "radioactive waste disposal"
• Leaving out any synonyms and choosing only the term you really want. If you're really interested in the effects of aspirin, then you can drop " ... OR pain relievers OR analgesics".
• Using subject headings or descriptors to focus your result set. Your initial search might be "KW=drug resistance," with many hundreds of hits -- but finding the appropriate subject heading, and searching that as a subject term, "SU=drug resistance," narrows and focuses your results
• Limiting your search by year, or by language, as appropriate. If you only read English, then limit to English. If your topic deals with contemporary attitudes towards spousal abuse in the 1940s, then consider limiting your search to those years (tip: be careful not to overlook later material that may be relevant, however.

• Broader or more general concepts. For example, "water use AND conflict*" instead of "the tension between urban water demands and agricultural water use."
• Checking to see that you've constructed your search query correctly.
  • Many article indexes require logical operators: "Architecture AND Caribbean Basin AND 1970s" rather than the natural-language query, "Architecture of the Caribbean Basin in the 1970s."
  • Some indexes allow you to string words together (like Google) "Architecture Caribbean Basin 1970s," while others would interpret that as an exact phrase search, and you'd probably get no results.
• Taking out search terms that are not essential to your topic. If your topic is property damage resulting from the New Madrid earthquake of 1811-1812, you may not need to include the term "1811-1812." You may not even need to include the term "earthquake" -- try searching "New Madrid" and "property damage."
• Synonyms for your search terms. For example, you might search for "education OR teaching OR instruction OR study" rather than "education."
• Wildcards and truncation symbols to improve your results. In the example above, you might search "educ* OR teach* OR instruct* or stud*" to catch all plurals and variations of those words.
• Widening the scope of your search -- from title/abstract to full-text, for example. Make sure your year range is set appropriately.
• Using a different article index. There may be one that is better suited to your subject area or that is larger or more general in scope. See Finding Articles.