Anthropology

Sometimes you find a lot of good articles or books but you cannot include them because your professor requires that your sources be anthropological. What does this mean? Each professor may have specific criteria but generally this means that the source was written by an anthropologist and employs anthropological theories and/or methods.

Check Your Database

Resouces like Google Scholar, Library Search, and even many of the Library's databases contain scholarship across a wide range of disciplines, not just the social sciences, let alone anthropology. Searching within a specific Anthropology database, such as Anthropology Plus or Anthrosource, will ensure that the sources your discover are more likely to be within the scope of anthropology.

Articles

• Particularly when searching more general databases such as Library Search, you should add the terms anthropol* or ethnol* or ethnog* to your search to narrow down to anthropology articles.
• Be sure to include the * in order to make sure that the database searches all endings of the word (e.g. anthropology, anthropologist, anthropologists).
• Note: While Anthropology Plus focuses on Anthropology, you can still sometimes come across articles from other disciplines such as sociology so you may want to do the same thing there.

Books

You can do the same thing when using Library Search.

Google it - If you Google the author's name you can often find their information from the institution they are affiliated with. This can be difficult with very common names but you can add a the name of the institution they are from (if you know it) or maybe a few key words that would reflect the topic of their research in order to narrow it down.