If you haven't done research outside of the sciences before, it can be difficult to locate what you need when looking for regional historical or cultural information.

The best way to search Articles+ is to use Boolean operators — AND, OR, NOT. Quotation marks "" and parentheses () can also be used to structure a query, much like how you structure mathematical equations to show the order of operations. In tools like Articles+ and Google Scholar, instead of using NOT, the system uses a minus sign, as in the search exoplanet atmospheres -"hot jupiters"

Let's look specifically at different types of searches we can do in library resources.

Cultural and Regional Information

Let's say that we are visiting Oman for field work. Yale Library has extensive information about Oman's culture, history, and geology. Your strategy in the catalog will be two-pronged:

1. Using subjects to browse content in a specific part of our organizational schema
2. Keyword searching and date filtering

We also recommend setting up a folder in Zotero or EndNote to pull in the references you need to stay organized — especially the ebooks and articles in our collections.

Let's say that we already have a few books about Oman to get us started:

• Geology of the Oman Mountains, Eastern Arabia by Michael Searle
• Evolution of Land and Life in Oman: An 800 Million Year Story by Mohammed Hilal Al Kindi
• Geology and Tectonics of the Oman Region, A.H.F. Robertson, M.P. Searle, A.C. Ries

In the catalog links, each of these items has subject tags in the record, such as Geology > Oman Region or Historical Geology. These subjects are clickable, and they will take you to other books tagged with those terms. One thing to keep in mind is that these are nested categories, and you will only be seeing other things in the same nested part of our subject hierarchy. Geology > Oman Region will take you to fewer results than a subject-specific search for Geology AND Oman. However, it's good to look at the assigned subjects so you get familiar with the terminology used in Library of Congress subject headings.

Oman and adjacent countries are also sometimes grouped into their geographic region, the Arabian Peninsula. You may also want to search for books about that area to catch things that you may have missed. Remember that the OR operator is always helpful — the subject search above can easily be changed to Geology AND (Oman OR "Arabian Peninsula").

For cultural information, let's do a search that we can filter. If we want history and culture of Oman, in addition to travel information, we can search for Oman AND (history OR culture OR travel) in All Fields. Some of these books are from a long time ago, though, so we can use filtering to narrow down the search from 2005 to the present. If we only want English-language books, we can select the language filter for English. Here's the final version of that search. If we want fewer results, we can do an Advanced Search that flips Oman into a subject search so we're just looking at history, culture, and travel in that context. That search is a bit better at capturing what we want.

If you want to see what US-Oman relations are like or explore another aspect of Oman, you can modify any of those searches. Feel free to reach out with questions about customizing this search process for your region of interest.

Geopolitical Information

If you are doing coursework or other research looking at the history of engagement with developing countries' mineral resources by corporations and more well-resourced governments, here are some searches that can help you during your search.

(geology OR geophysics OR "earth sciences") AND (exploitation OR labor OR politics) AND ("rare earth minerals" OR "conflict minerals")

The above search is generally useful for finding information about diversity, equity, and inclusion. It is also available here for browsing. 

Replacing the section (exploitation OR labor OR politics) with something like (colonialism OR imperialism) might seem helpful, but it won't always yield consistent results, and it may also include information on human migration patterns that aren't relevant to your topic. If you are interested in a nation's engagement in an area, e.g., Spain or the United States in Latin America, the United States or China in Africa, and so on, you may benefit from searching directly for the name of the country plus the region or set of countries included in the region.

Articles+ has some additional features that make it more useful for an in-depth search for this topic than Google Scholar. For example, you can use the topic/subject filters on the left-hand side to drill down to a specific set of subjects, and you can also limit to document type, like journal articles or dissertations. By default, Articles+ only shows you items we can access electronically (about 80% of our online resources; some of our highly specialized business and chemical databases aren't compatible, unfortunately), and you can click on "Add results beyond your library's collection" below the main search box to see items that you could order through interlibrary loan. 

Above, we looked at Articles+. Here, we are looking at Proquest Natural Science Collection, which will limit our results to many natural sciences fields, including most earth and planetary science subdisciplines.

One important difference between ProQuest databases, including the Natural Science Collection, and Articles+ is that the Boolean operator NOT is the preferred method of negation in a ProQuest database. Keep that in mind if you need to remove any words or phrases from your results. It's also harder to share links to specific searches in ProQuest databases, so please use this link to try out any of the searches below for yourself: https://yale.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/naturalscience?accountid=15172

Let's search for a topic related to developing your professional identity. As a heads up, if you type belonging AND geosciences, many of the results will treat the word belonging in a broad way, with meanings ranging from "this rock belongs to X time period" to the actual meaning we want. A search for belonging AND geosciences AND professional refines the results because it lets ProQuest know that we're interested in a "human in STEM" topic, that of how we improve belonging in the geosciences profession.

Taking a look at any of the books in the left-hand panel and viewing their citations can also be useful for finding specific authors and topics to search either here or in Articles+. You may also take interest in highlighting passages, proper names, and terminology used in blog posts and outreach articles about a topic of interest.