Fifth Step to Analysis: Finding Resources using Databases and other Search Engines

Currently, I am a student at George Mason University and as with any college or university, there are many databases available to students to search for research work and documents in a variety of fields including history and science. This is why I am going to give specific directions on using GMU’s InfoGuides but they can still be translated to other library databases available at other resource locations.

With any resource site, there are many databases that contain resources involving American history. Because I am focusing on American history, the databases I want to search through should return resources involving Americans and their lives. Then to narrow down the information, include search criteria that specify immigrants of Chinese descendents. On another note, you can find articles on any topic you can think of because I came across a journal article called “Playing Rough and Tough: Chinese American Women Basketball Players in the 1930s and 1940s.”

Trying to find American Census data:

Opening the InfoGuides gives you a large array of links and a search bar. I think it is best to type into the search bar rather than navigate the entire website. I used search criteria “US Census” and the database returned several links to outside websites that contain information about historical census data. I found a link to “www.census.gov.” That is the official site of the American Census Bureau. I navigated the site to find census documents from 1920. In the next post, I am going to isolate what information I found useful from these extensive documents.

Trying to find first-person resources involving Chinese-Americans:

This was a more difficult task to accomplish. I started by using the library’s main search engine but that did not result in relevant articles until I modified the search criteria. In the last few years, to student advantage, many libraries have transferred many textual resources to PDFs. Helpful resources came to light when I searched for “Chinese American 1920.” I also found some resources about the life of Chinese women by adding the keyword woman to the previous search. Also the best articles for our purpose are not necessarily going to be in the first five links because the database does not have our purpose in mind. It took navigating through several pages of links using the titles, which were much more informative than I imagined, to find sources I had in mind.

Sources I found that can be useful for our purpose included “Cultural Politics and Chiense-Amerian Female Subjectivity: Rethinking Kingston’s Woman Warrior”, “Malthusian Models and Chinese Ralities: The Chinese Demograpic System 1700-2000”, “The Identity Formation of American-Born Chinese in the 1930s” and more.