Anthropology 115: Religion in Cross-Cultural Encounters
Library Research Guide

Locating Books in Acorn, the library's catalog of its books, media, and journal titles
   Note: Acorn does not include journal article titles or authors (see Locating Journal Articles)

When beginning a research project, it is usually best to begin with a keyword search. Once you have looked at the full record for a few items that are close to your topic you will have a better sense of the subject headings that will be used to describe material on this topic. For example, if you do a "Words Anywhere" search for Native Americans, you will see that the subject heading that is used for books on this population is Indians of North America. You can click on any of the subject headings in a record and Acorn will automatically run a search on that subject heading.

In general, the fewer terms you use in a search, the greater number of hits you will retrieve. To narrow a search, you can add terms and combine different concepts with the term "and".

To broaden a search, you can combine similar terms (synonyms, alternate spellings) with the word OR (ex. inca or inka). Another way to broaden your search, is to use the truncation symbol to pick up variants of those terms (ex. relig$ and maya$). truncation symbol: $

Locating Journal Articles

Journals are indexed in many databases, which may provide citations only, full-text, or some of both depending on the database and the particular journal issue.

Anthropology Plus
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The principal index to articles, essays and other publications in anthropology, archaeology and related subjects, it is derived from the periodicals and books in the premier anthropology collection at the Tozzer Library of Harvard University and the Royal Anthropological Institute.

AnthroSource
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A searchable archive of all the American Anthropological Association's journals, with access to current issues for 11 of the AAA's most critical peer-reviewed publications. Newsletters and bulletins are included. Full citations and seamless access to archival content housed at JSTOR are provided.

ATLA Religion Database
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The American Theological Library Association’s ATLA Religion Database contains over one million bibliographic records covering the research literature of religion in 26 languages. It includes article citations from 650 journals, essay citations from 14,000 multi-author works, and book review citations. Coverage is from 1949 to the present.

Full-text databases containing information about cultures and archaeological traditions, respectively. These texts are subject-indexed at the paragraph level for quick retrieval of specific information. For search tips, see eHRAF User Guides, which include search strategy tips, a tutorial, a glossary and more.

Other Resources

For a full list of databases that index articles relevant to anthropology, go to the Heard Library Homepage, and select Research Databases. At the top of the page you have the option to generate a list of databases by discipline.

For selected Internet sites, see Resources for Anthropology & Archaeology.

Last updated: September 17, 2007
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