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CAP 3157 / RELS 3157 - Monsters, Vampires, and Religion: An Awesome Alliance

This guide supports students in the "Monsters, Vampires, and Religion" course as they work on their projects about monsters in a contemporary novel. Resources have been based on the online format of this class.

Search Techniques for Library Databases

Google Techniques

Limit to government and organizational sites  (site:)

  • Example:  "minority health"  site:gov

  • Example: "access to healthcare"  site:iowa.gov

Use quotes around a single word/phrase to force Google to include a word/phrase

  • Example:  "iowa"  "health literacy"

  • Example: "poverty"  "race" 

Use quotes around a phrase to keep next to each other

  • Example:  "maternal mortality"

Add the word "statistics" to include it

  • Example:  "poverty"  "statistics"

Use minus sign (-) to exclude words

  • Example:  "maternal mortality" -infant

Step-by-step Tutorials on How to Use Google

Advanced Research Techniques

Advanced Research Techniques

Below are documents that show how to find more research using the "Snowball Technique" where you can locate older research (using
bibliographies) and find more current research (using Cited By in Google Scholar).