National History Day: Discover GALILEO and Primary Sources

When searching for journal articles in VSU’s databases, here are some important strategies to keep in mind.

Use Keywords

Keywords help focus your search on what you’re looking for.

Instead of this phrasing: “What role did the resistance play in World War II?"

Try:  resistance AND World War II

Boolean Operators

There are three Boolean operators – AND, OR and NOT.

AND 

Helps narrow your search.

Take the example from above: resistance  AND  World War II

 We tell the search to look for all articles that contain both of these phrases “resistance” AND “World War II”.

OR

 Helps broaden your search. We tell the search that we will accept both possibilities in our search results.

Example: World War, 1939-1945  OR  World War II

NOT 

Can help make your search more precise. If a result that is different than what you intended keeps dominating your search results, you can use NOT to remove it.

Experiment

Try entering your search terms in quotations marks or parentheses. 

So instead of: World War II

Try: "World War II"

Example:  resistance AND ("World War, 1939-1945" OR "World War II")

Limiters 

With each result page, there is a section on the right that gives you options to limit your results. You can select limiters like: 

• Full Text
• Type of information source (Academic Journals, eBooks, Dissertations/Theses, etc.)
• A specific journal
• Subject 
• Location
• Publication date
• Quotation marks can help keep your search terms together.  
• ​ Parentheses can be useful if your career has different terms that can be used to refer to it. Putting these terms in parentheses tells the search to look for all of these terms. This strategy can help you get more relevant results. 

Discover GALILEO can be a great tool to discover primary sources on your topic. 

Tips for Searching Discover

Start Simple

• First, you need to search for your topic. It can be helpful to start with simpler or broader terms. So if your topic is a person or an event, try searching for the name of your person or event first.  

Use Quotation Marks

• Quotation marks are helpful when you're searching for phrases like an event or a person's name. It tells the database to keep your search terms together rather than looking at each search term individually. 

For example, searching for "World War II" in Discover GALILEO yields 4,173,517 results. 

Using Discover to Find Primary Sources

But with the search of "World War II", Discover GALILEO gives us some interesting primary sources to work with.

Browsing Videos in Search Results

As you scroll down to the very bottom of the page, you should see videos from the Associated Press. If these videos were produced during the same time period of World War II, these would count as primary sources.  The benefit of searching Discover GALILEO for these video sources is that it also provides citations in APA, MLA, CMS, and Harvard. 

Using Publication Date Limiter to Find Primary Sources

This same concept works for articles as well. If you got to advanced search (the link is found under the search bar at the top of the page) you should see the option to limit to a date range. If you enter the date of your time period, any articles published during the period of your event would also count as primary sources.