Follow these steps:
This guide contains tips & tricks for completing your final paper for FCE333: French Rap & Rock. If you complete this guide and are still stuck, feel free to email me for a one-on-one appointment. Just check my calendar first to suggest a good time for us to meet.
This guide is set up so that you can go through a three-step process to attempt to find the best articles to support your search.
Take out a sheet of paper and list some potential search terms. These could be:
- The people you're searching (North Africans in France, Western Africans in France, People from the Caribbean in France, immigrants, children of immigrants)
- The historical period you're searching (colonial history, slavery)
(♪) NOTE (♪): You're not likely to be searching for "music." It will be your job to make connections back to the music you've studied this semester. You're looking for external sources which support the lyics of songs.
Use AND, OR, and NOT to come up with the most effective search.
AND narrows your search. Use AND to find articles with each term.
OR expands your searches. Use OR to find articles with any of the terms.
NOT excludes terms. Use NOT to remove articles that don't make sense.
You might need to exclude America in your searches. You can do this by ending your search with NOT America. To exclude articles about American as well as Canada you could end your search with NOT (America OR Canada).
- JSTOR This link opens in a new windowThis database should work really well. You will need to limit your results to articles and exclude the term America.
- Academic Search Complete This link opens in a new windowThis is our largest database and will definitely have articles on your topic. Terms that work well are "Caribbean people" as well as "West African."
- Google Scholar This link opens in a new windowGoogle Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. Search across a wide variety of disciplines and sources. Please note that you will need to configure Google Scholar to link to Drake Library databases in order to gain full-text access to many articles.
Additional Tips & Tricks
Useful links: Citing Guide (MLA) & Article Look up by Citation
Click the 
button to search the entire library's collection for your content. If we don't have it, we can get it through Interlibrary Loan within 24-48 hours for most articles and 1 week for most books.
Librarian
119A Drake Memorial Library