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Academic Writing Tips & Resources

This subject guide is designed to help Koç University students on various types of academic writing issues that may be encountered as they work through their courses, including writing research papers, essays, literature reviews and more.

Finding

To support your claim you should find appropriate kind and amount of evidence. In this part of the libguide you will learn where to find scholarly sources, primary & secondary sources and Suna Kıraç Library's sources.

Also, reference librarians can help you refine and focus research topics, develop successful search strategies and identify appropriate sources for academic research projects and assignments. Schedule an appointment with a librarian for a research consultation by creating a request through Library Trackit.

Search Strategies

Keywords help you to retrieve better and more related results about the topic you are searching. To understand your subject better, you can use broad keywords. When you want specific sources then narrow keywords. 

Remember the Boolean Operators part! Always use Alternative Keywords to not miss any related resources.

Truncation (*) is a symbol that helps you to search different various of a word.

For instance, when you type laugh* to a search box; laugh, laughter, laughing, etc. will be in the results.

Wildcards (?, #) help you to search different variant of a word. (e.g. archaeology and archeology)

For instance, c?t (for one character) or hum#r (for one or more character)

c?t; cat, cut, etc.

hum#r; humor or humour

The symbols can vary among databases. Please check "Help" parts of the databases to use correct symbol

Exact phrase search can be used especially when you use two term words. This search strategy limits your results as it only search that phrase.

Most search engines add "AND" between terms and broaden the results. 

When you search Forced Migration, you may see results about Cell Migration which is not related to your topic. If you search the term as "Forced Migration", then you will see the term as a whole in the results page.

Use the "References" or "Bibiography" parts of the articles that you find. These parts can help you to locate additional related sources about your topic.

 

Most databases have their own subject headings that help you to save time while searching for related resources. By using subject headings, you can easily avoid irrelevant sources that you come across in keyword searching.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Please note that Subject Headings can vary among databases.

A basic search will work well while you are searching for broad topics.

An advanced search allows you to construct a more focused search and to limit your search to Title, Author, Subject Terms, and so on.