ENGL 126 Research Writing: Humanities (Barrington)

Literature of Prison and the Incarceral State

Identifying Useful Search Terms

Search Terms

To find sources on a subject, we use words that capture the ideas we are looking for.

Finding useful sources takes persistence. Try a range of relevant Keywords and Subject Terms supplied by the databases to find sources about your text, author, genre, and ideas!

Keywords:
  • Author: Example - "colson whitehead"
  • Text: Example - "orange is the new black"
  • Genre: Example - "prison memoir"
  • Idea: Example - (masculinity OR manhood) AND "prison literature"
Subject Terms (a very partial list):
  • Race relations in literature
  • PRISONERS' writings
  • PRISON Literature in America
  • ARABIC Prison Literature
  • PRISONS in literature
  • PRISONERS as authors
  • POLITICAL prisoners' writings
  • literary criticism
  • literary genres
  • political prisoners
Search Strategies:
  • put phrases in quotation marks: "political prisoners"
  • Use AND to connect and focus ideas: "prison writings" AND "literary criticism"
  • Use OR to search synonyms or alterative terms: (gender OR women)
  • Use truncation * to search forms of a root word: prison* = prison, prisoners
  • Use keywords and subject terms that capture main ideas, rather than long natural phrasing
  • Be persistent! Try a range of search terms and research tools

Video: How to Use Keywords to Form a Research Strategy

Source: "From topic to search results in two minutes! " by Holman Library is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Learn about strategizing keywords and how databases work when searching keywords.