Find books, articles, and more:
This collection is also called our "Popular Reading Collection." To find these books at TCU, use the words: "Popular Reading Collection" (with the quotes) in the TCU Library Catalog to find books in this collection.
The TCU Library has ebooks! Learn how to connect the library's ebooks to your reading devices.
To find books or articles on your topic at TCU, start with your main ideas. If I were interested in finding information about elections for example, I would try words like:
Politics
Voting
Elections
Use quotes to keep phrases together. For example:
Combine ideas to narrow down your results. For example:
"El Salvador" AND "social movements"
If you know the date of your event, you can add the date into your search. For example:
"Civil Rights" AND "United States" AND 1964
If you want to find books about a certain topic in a particular century, add that century into your search. For example:
"El Salvador" AND politics AND "20th century"
In addition to searching by topic, you can also search by title or author if you know that information.
PROBLEM: No results found!
FIX : Search individual terms (separate with AND) do not use whole sentences.
Good search: children AND obesity
Bad search: children who are overweight
How this works...
Databases search for individual words, not sentences.
PROBLEM: Not enough results found!
FIX : Use a wildcard symbol (*) to increase matches to your keywords.
Example 1: teen*
Example 2: wom*n
How this works…
PROBLEM: Too many results found!
FIX: Use phrase searching to search for an exact person, place or thing related to your topic. Do this by putting quotation marks around words that need to be in a specific order:
Example 1: “Robert William Smith”
Example 2: “Fairview City Park”
Example 3: “California Psychological Inventory”
How this works…
To find books using FrogScholar, select "Library Catalog" from the options on the left:
