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Researching your assignments

The assignments for ANTH 3392 are short essays. You'll need to find information to support your perspectives, from reference texts to scholarly articles to necrologies - start here!

Find information in reference texts

  • find background and in-depth information
  • find information on archaeological sites. artefacts, theories
  • enhance your understanding key concepts and to identify other sources of information about your topic

Search for deceased individuals

For living scholars, seek out their faculty pages at their institutions, and once you know their research focus, see if they have a website for their research projects. You can also see their program of study through Google Scholar, ORCID, or repositories of their work.

"Festschrifts"

Festschriften (German) or melanges (French)
These are celebratory volumes of work published in honour of a prominent scholar. 

Useful ways to search for these include the terms "in honour of," "in celebration of," "a festschrift for," and the honoured scholar's name.

Obituaries and Necrologies

Necrologies are a listing of people who have died during a specific time period; obituaries are short notices of death. Many newspapers will have a specific search for obituaries. Look for a link or select "obituary" under type.

Book reviews

In most databases, you can choose to search within book reviews as a type. This is a good way of understanding the context of a scholar's work from a critical perspective.

Search for Journal Articles

Search tips: 

Use * to say "I don't care how this word ends" 

OR to combine alternate terms for the same concept group,

AND to combine different concepts,

e.g. (Syro-Palestinian OR Palestininan OR Levantine) AND (Judean Pillar Figurines OR pillar figurines OR JPF)

LibrarySearch

Cite your sources in SAA format

Article Searching Tips

Finding too much?

  • Use AND between ideas to search for BOTH terms
  • Put “Quotation Marks Around Your Search" to search for exact phrases

Finding too little?

  • Use OR between your ideas to search for EITHER term
  • Put * after the root of a word to look for multiple endings

For better searching, think of multiple ways to describe your topic

What You Need to Know About Citation

Citation is stating where you got your information.

The reasons you cite:

  • To give credit where credit is due – to avoid plagiarizing
  • To give information about a source so people (i.e. your instructor) can find it

You need to cite:

  • In the paper (in-text citations)
  • At the end (reference list)
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