This guide includes information and resources designed to aid you in locating research for your research project. For further assistance with your research, contact the research desk or schedule an appointment with your librarian.

Catalyst is a simple way to search across the library catalog and nearly a billion articles, videos, reference books and more at once. You can search for articles and books at the same time, across all subjects.

Start with Catalyst when you are beginning your research, doing interdisciplinary searching, or looking for a specific book or article by title.

There's a lot of good information out on the web! The trick is to find it amongst everything else out there.

Keywords

Depending on your topic, choosing the right keywords can be extremely important to making sure you get relevant results:

• Think about the terms that authors might use in writing about your topic.
• Pay attention to the results you're getting and think about what terms seem to be working, and which ones aren't
• Use those in future searches on Google and in other places.

Narrowing your search

• You can narrow your search to only results from a specific domain or type of domain by adding the search operator "site:" to your search.
  • "site:.edu" narrows to websites from US educational institutions.
  • "site:.ac.uk" will narrow to UK educational institutions. 
  • "site:.gov" will narrow to US government sites.
• On the search results page, you can narrow your search to particular types of sources and to sites published during a certain time.  You can also choose to search on your exact words instead of the Google's default of searching for similar words.