Before you begin searching for sources, try taking a few minutes to reflect on this question: What is important to me about my sources? How you answer this question is entirely up to you, but some of the following statements might inspire your thinking:

• It's important that my sources fit the parameters my professor gave us for this assignment
• It's important that I consult the most current, recent research on my topic
• It's important that I find and incorporate foundational scholarship on my topic, even if it was published many years ago
• It's important that I find sources that express diverse perspectives on my topic
• It's important that I use sources that went through the process of peer-review 
• It's important that my sources were published in well-regarded journals or by reputable university presses 

Your list of what's important about your sources is one way of thinking about the criteria you'll use to evaluate your sources - and you can use your evaluation criteria to develop your search strategies.

Where you search for sources is just as important as how you search for sources. Remember that there's no single place for every possible source you might need for your research! You'll want to match your database(s) or search tool(s) to the types of sources you need. One way to think about databases and search tools is this inverted triangle model. It moves from very broad to more specific - but any and all of these tools may be useful for your research. 

Google - good for taking a very wide view of a topic, and for accessing a variety of materials not found in library databases (blogs and social media, some news sources, reports, etc.)

Google Scholar - still a huge swath of information, but more focused on scholarly publications (including journal articles, book chapters, conference proceedings, etc.)

Web of Science, Scopus, and JSTOR - academic databases with an explicit focus on scholarly publications, with many options for complex, targeted searching

Specialized databases - some are focused on a subject area (EconLit, America: History and Life, etc.), while others are focused on a type of source (news, primary sources, images, videos, etc.) 

Here are some examples of matching your database/search tool to the types of sources you need:

I need books and articles about my topic.

Library Search, the Vassar library catalog and discovery platform, is a good starting point, because it contains both our physical collections (books, DVDs, musical scores, etc.) and many (but not all!) of our electronic collections (e-journals, journal articles, etc.). 

I'm writing a final paper for a sociology course and need to find scholarly articles written by sociologists, published in reputable sociology journals. 

Library Search is still a good starting point, but you should also try subject-specific databases - in this case, Sociological Abstracts.  Specialized subject databases will give you a more complete view of the existing literature than Library Search will, while also limiting your search to a discipline, subject area, field or subfield, etc. You can also search within a specific journal; look up the title of the journal in our journal search to see if and how we have access, and if our access covers the years that you need. 

My topic is very current, about an event happening right now; I need news articles. 

Search by the title of a newspaper in the journal search, or check out our lists of news databases (current and historical). 

If you've answered the question What is important to me about my sources?, you've already given some thought to the criteria you'll use to evaluate your sources. Within Library Search and databases, you can use these criteria when you search. Here are some examples of how can use search filters (usually along the side of a page of search results), or an advanced search, to find sources that meet your criteria:

I need scholarly sources -> Look for an option to limit your results to peer-reviewed articles.

I need sources published within the past 5 years -> Look for an option to limit your search to a range of publication years.

I need sources that were published in journals in a specific field -> Look for an option to limit your search by subject, and/or limit your search to particular journals. 

I have a lot of search results and I'm not sure where to begin -> If your results are journal articles, you'll probably see an abstract for each work; abstracts describe the issues, approaches taken, or arguments explored by authors, and are a succinct way to get a sense of what a source is actually about. With an advanced search, you can often look for keywords that appear in an abstract - meaning that your keywords are so relevant that they'll appear in the article's description, not just in the title or somewhere in the text. 

I don't have many (or any) search results and I'm not sure what's wrong -> Sometimes a small number of search results can mean that there's a lack of research on your topic; or, it could be that you'd have better results searching in a different database and/or using different keywords. Make sure you're matching your database or search tool to your research need; try broader keywords or synonyms; and when in doubt, ask a librarian. 

Bibliographic tracing can be a helpful method for finding sources. It can help you find connections between authors and areas of scholarship, or identify important research that you may have missed in your searches.

-> Start with a relevant source (like a course reading or something you’ve found while searching).

-> What does that author cite? Check the references/bibliography.

-> Among those citations, are there other sources that seem potentially relevant to your research? Make a note of them.

-> Use Library Search and other databases to get access to these sources at Vassar. (If the citation is to a book, begin with a title search in Library Search; if it's an article, try this citation finder using as much of the citation as you have. Searching by the article's title in Library Search is also a good starting point.) If we don’t have these sources on campus, use Interlibrary Loan - even for articles!

ChatGPT and other generative AI tools may have legitimate uses in research and writing - but as tools for finding sources, they’re more likely to lead you astray! When asked to find citations to sources on a topic, ChatGPT will often generate a bibliography of sources that don’t actually exist. What’s especially confusing is that these citations will appear convincing, using names of scholars who write on a topic, titles of real journals, and/or article titles that combine relevant keywords - but the sources themselves are nowhere to be found.

This is a limitation of generative AI that may be resolved over time. For now, though, keep in mind that ChatGPT is not a search engine (like Google) or a database (like JSTOR), and bring a healthy skepticism to the citations it provides.