When selecting resources to search, be aware of things like date ranges within databases or newspaper archives. In other words, once you’ve selected your word, you should have some sense of when it first appeared in print, and least according to the OED. So, selected a databases or newspaper archives that pre-dates that citation.
Be aware that some database provide citations with abstracts and not a lot of full text. If you get a lead form one of these, you may have to dig deeper to find the full text and do a keywords search.
Also be aware that many online resources are limited because of paywalls. If you hit a paywall, see if UCF has access &/or if you can request the item you want through Inter-Library Loan. When doing this kind of research, Inter Library Loan is your friend.
Related to the above, note how, during our in-class demos, there were times when the dates were misleading and resulted in false leads. For example, in one case, I found a potential in Google Books that dated the first appearance of Moonlighting at 1900, well before the date in the OED. Upon further investigation, however, I learned that the author's birth date was in 1900 and the book was published in the 1970s, but this wasn't clear in google Books. For this reason, you should always be skeptical and double-check the dates.
Here are some examples of other common dating errors:
Be skeptical and double check. A good source for date verification of books is Worldcat:
Even databases that provide citations with little full text will contain metadata to help guide your searching and point you to other resources.
This can include information about publication sources, author(s), keywords, subject terms, and possibly an abstract.
This information can reveal specialized journals/books that would be difficult to find through keyword searching.
We talked in class about using advanced search techniques to refine your results. Here’s an overview of the most common techniques:
Quotation Marks: Use quotation marks to create a set phrase or to search for a specific name. For example, searching hot dog Vs. “hot dog” will yield very different results. If your phrase includes very common words like this, use the quotes to create a set phrase and weed out unwanted results. This works for names too.
Asterisk: Place an asterisk at the end of the root of a word to search for multiple variations of that word at once. For example, searching wom* will bring back results for woman, women, women’s, and any other variants that may exist.
Question Mark: Similar to the above, place a question mark within a word with multiple variants to search for all those variants at once. For example, wom?n will search for woman and women. This can also work if there’s a slight variation the spelling of a name or word.
Consider looking for resources specific to UCF. Some good places to start would include:
Special Collections & University Archives (SCUA)