Religious Studies: RST 610 Ethnic Religion in the United States

·         For more research options, go to Religious Studies Research Guide 

FOUR GENERAL SEARCH TIPS

1. If you place an asterisk* at the end of the word, you will catch all word variants. So if you type in word*, it will find all subject headings using the terms: word or words or wordiness or wordy or wordsmith, etc. (Don't use the asterisk a google search. It does not work)

2. If you want to force word adjacency or find a phrase, such as "native american religions",  or "navajo shamanism" but your words in quotation marks. (This will work in google too).

3. If you want synonyms in a search, make capitalize OR (religion* OR spiritual* OR faith OR worship). (This will work in google too).

4. You can use both "" and * such as in a search for "native american relig*" which will find the phrase native american religion OR native american religions OR native american religiosity

FINDING BOOKS (print and online)

Use OneSearch Book Search to find books and media we have.

If you want higher relevancy in your results, try a OneSearch Subject Keyword Search for terms within a subject (or descriptor) heading, and will result in more highly relevant books.

Try some of these subject keyword combinations below in conjunction with an a secondary topic of interest.

religio*   faith*   spirit*   mytholog*   christian*   (name of a denomination)    buddh*   "new age"   hindu*   islam*   animis*   shaman*

• Using any of the above techniques, also conduct the exact same search using CSU+ to find even more materials at nearby CSU libraries.
• Use WORLDCAT for hard to find books and archival material around the world. It identifies over 100 million titles. 

BOOK AND JOURNAL LOANING OPTIONS FROM OTHER LIBRARIES

• CSU+ rapidly get books delivered to CSULB from other CSU libraries
• BeachReach to get journal articles not found in our library or online. 
• Both services described how to borrow from another library

KEY DATABASES TO USE (ONLINE AND PRINT)

Academic Search Complete (Comprehensive interdisciplinary access to nearly 3000 scholarly journals.

American Indian Experience Database of full text journals and other research publications.

Anthropology Plus Worldwide in scope, research in journals, book chapters.

AnthroSource More focused on research pertaining to North American than Anthro Plus. 

ATLA Religious Studies Comprehensive scholarly database on religious studies, focus on Judeo-Christian, but others included.

Dissertations and Theses (Full text access to book length PhD writings. Good for original research.

ERIC. Huge database on education from preschool to graduate studies. May cover pegagogy.

Ethnic Newswatch. Full text journal articles and news items.

Global Newsstream Thousands of U.S. and international newspapers full text covering the last 30+ years.

Historical Abstracts (For scholarly articles on World History published since the 1950s) and America History and Life (for U.S & Canadian History)

Historical New York Times 1851-2012 (Full text content to newspaper) and Historical Los Angeles Times 1881-1993

JSTOR (Full text online archive to hundreds of scholarly journals dating back to the 1800s

Project Muse Scholarly articles in the social sciences and humanities.

PsychINFO Scholarly articles in psychology

Sociological Abstracts Scholarly articles in sociology

GOOGLE TIPS

• To find web sites based in that county, use two letter Internet country codes at end of search
• For sites in a country, type in the two letter country code: e.g  brazil slavery history site:br
• Search only within certain Internet domains:

site:edu (for U.S. academic sites)

site:gov (for government sites

site:org (for nonprofit organizations, museums, institutes)

site:int (for international organizations such as UN

• Use Google Scholar to find a wide range of interdisciplinary scholarly journals. You may be able to open many of these articles if searching on our campus (since it knows our IP address and what we subscribe to.)

See this google scholar search for "native american religions" and "african americans"

• Use Google Books to identify a wide array of books that might exist on your topic. The ones that say PREVIEW you may read about 1/10th of. The ones that say READ  you can read everything but SNIPPET only gives you a sentence. You can then check our COAST catalog or LINK+ to see if it can be borrowed quickly.

See these google books search results for "native americans" and buddhism