Veterans' Services Library Resource Guide: Research Tools and Tips

The Research Assignment Calculator offers step by step guidance on planning your assignments, be they papers or presentations.  Click here to go to the Calculator.

Abstracts fall into two different kinds; the informative and the indicative.

Informative abstracts follow the organization of the paper and address these key points.

• Purpose -states the purpose of the research
• Method - method used to gather the research or data
• Results- Brief statement of the result or conclusion

Indicative abstracts do not always follow the structure of the paper and provide a content summary, either of the argument of the document or the contribution made to the understanding of the topic or the issue

During the research process, reading an Abstract can help you to determine whether a source is worth reading all the way through or not.

When you first begin doing research, you may get hundreds of thousands of search results, which can make the research process overwhelming. However, there are a number of ways you can refine and focus your searching to make your list of results more manageable.

Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) can help you to limit or expand your search.

• AND: Searching for both terms, i.e. WWII AND Italy
• OR: Searching for either term, i.e. WWII OR Italy
• NOT: Searching that excludes sources on a given topic, i.e. WWII NOT Italy

Gil-Find, Galileo Discover, and many subscription databases enable you to refine your results beyond using boolean operators. In most interfaces, you will find a menu on the left hand side of the screen (like the one pictured here), which will allow you to make decisions on what to include or exclude from your search results. Limiting by subject and language can be particularly helpful.

Refining your search results using the limiters provided by a given database can help your search results to be more focused, and more manageable.