Library: ETHN/SOC 207 (Lopez) SP24: Home

Picking a Topic

1. What are your Interests?

Be Curious: Reflect on course topics that intrigue you.
What topics resonate with your personal experiences, community issues, or societal concerns you're passionate about?

2. Background Research

Test your topic by searching websites and reference databases, like Gale eBooks, to learn foundational knowledge on your topic. Do you see sources written about your topic? After reading them, are you still interested in it?
Identify Keywords: While conducting background research, pick out important terms, historical events, key figures, and relevant concepts that will help you delve deeper into the topic.

3. Narrow Topic

Consider specific issues, events, or aspects of your initial topic. Use the 5 W's (who, what, when, where, why) to help.
- Broad topic - Hispanic heritage in the United States
- Narrow Topic - The role of Hispanic heritage in shaping community identity in Southern California.
Test this narrowed topic in databases and Google.

4. Create Research Question

Apply the 5 W's (who, what, when, where, why) to create a research question.
- How have traditional Mexican culinary practices influenced community connection among Mexican American families in Southern California?
Evaluate Question: Check in with your professor to get feedback on your question. MiraCosta librarians can help too!

Scholarly Articles

What is a Scholarly Article?

Scholarly (or Academic or Peer-Reviewed) Articles are:

Written by experts in the subject
Published in an academic/scholarly journal and may share the expert's original research
Peer-reviewed (checked by other experts prior to publication)
Use technical language
Use many in-text citations & cite many sources
Often include data, tables, charts, and graphs

Keywords

1. Locate keywords in your research question by identifying the main concepts

What role has American media played in furthering the anti-immigration movement?

2. Create synonyms/related terms of your main topics.

American	Media	Anti-immigration
United States	Television	Racism
California	Fox News	Nativism
	Facebook	Border wall
	Tiktok
	Social Media

Creating Good Keywords

Spelling counts! Not seeing many results? Double-check your spelling.
Try "Phrase Searching" - Place quotation marks around keywords you want to keep together.
- Examples: "social media" "Mexican American"
Use AND to link terms in the database. For example: "Mexican Americans" AND "social media" combines search terms so that each search result contains all of the terms.
Use OR to find either term; this is especially useful with synonyms. For example: Latina OR Chicana combines terms so that results contain either of your terms.
Think about how experts in the field would phrase the concepts you're researching and try those terms in your search.

Keyword searching is not an exact science and you'll need to experiment with many different combinations to find the best ones.

Popular vs Scholarly

Suggested Databases

EBSCOhost : All Databases This link opens in a new window
Cross-search all EBSCO databases (50+); magazines, journals, ebooks, news and primary sources, covering multi-disciplinary topics.
Diversity Collection (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
Global views of major topics in diversity, equity, and inclusion from ethnic, minority, and native presses, grassroots newspapers and magazines, and journals, news and newsletters focusing on gender and sexuality.
Latinx Thought and Culture: The NPR Archive, 1979-1990 This link opens in a new window
Latinx Thought and Culture: The NPR Archive, 1979-1990 is digitized audio with transcripts of two radio programs: the weekly Spanish-language Enfoque Nacional (1979-1988) and the Daily English-language Latin File (1988-1990). The programs focus on Latinx issues related to politics, sociology, human rights, the arts and more with interviews of key figures and news reporting by Latino/a journalists at the time.
Ethnic NewsWatch This link opens in a new window
Ethnic NewsWatch is a current resource of over 300 full-text newspapers, magazines, and journals of the ethnic and minority press, providing access to essential, often overlooked perspectives. Now also contains Ethnic NewsWatch: A History, which provides historical coverage of Native American, African American, and Hispanic American periodicals from 1959-1989.
American Mosaic: (ABC-CLIO databases cross-search) This link opens in a new window
The American Mosaic allows cross-searching of ABC-CLIO databases: Daily Life through History, Pop Culture Universe, The African American Experience, The Latino American Experience, and The American Indian Experience.
Gale Archives Unbound (Gale Primary Sources) This link opens in a new window
Gale Archives Unbound collections are a subset of Gale Primary Sources. MiraCosta College Library has access to over 300 collections covering African American Studies, American Indian Studies, Asian American Studies, Latin American & Caribbean Studies, LGBT Studies, Women's Studies, and many other topics.

More Ethnic Studies focused databases
Search over 30 databases focusing on topics within the discipline of Ethnic Studies