While you all have a great handle on searching the web, here are some tips anyway that can save you some time. You'll be reading newspaper accounts, and popular and scholarly writings to understand the event or issue. Once you have identified the background, and hopefully the actors, you are free to do a web search to see if there are statements, legislation, etc. to provide more context to your issue or event.
Tips:
- Your search will offer better results if you keep important phrases within quotations. For example: "doctors without borders" and rohingya will offer results that relate to Doctors Without Borders, the organization, rather than deal with multiple results that talk about doctors, borders, and the Rohingya.
- You can also narrow your search to a specific site. For example, rohingya and myanmar and hearings site:.gov will look for anything with these keywords within the .gov domain. Since .gov is primarily used in the US, this would apply to US hearings only.
- Likewise you can search for NGO and IGO names and seek their statements. If you have a specifically named government document or speech, you can put that complete name into quotes and try to find the actual text. If you do not know a specific document to search you can search for the organization name and then add keywords.
- If you are looking at a specific human rights event from Human Rights Watch, please note that their reports are very complete and also offer a section on the various actors and participants that will greatly help your research.
