Keywords:
Searching the full phrases in parentheses above will yield the most comprehensive results. You can also search keywords individually or in other groupings, such as "Indigenous AND comic books."
Subject Terms:
Search using Subject Terms in the Haskell online catalog by entering "su:" in the search bar, then typing or pasting a subject term after the colon. You can also select the "Subject Term" search field available on the catalog and some databases.
If at any point in your research you stumble upon a resource that could be helpful to someone else, feel free to drop it in the comment box here. We appreciate collaboration!
Academic databases index writing such as journal articles, book chapters, theses, and dissertations. They can be used to locate scholarship on comics, graphic novels, and Indigenous comics. Some may not include full-text. If you want to limit results to articles you can read in full, be sure to select the "full text" filter in Academic Search Complete or "Content I can access" under JSTOR's advanced search options.
The online databases below can be used to identify Indigenous comics creators, locate industry sales data, find comics publishing data, and more. These resources are typically managed by comics industry insiders and may be crowd-sourced or volunteer-run.
What is a boolean operator?
(Hint: not a surgeon that operates on ghosts!)
Boolean operators are used to combine concepts or ideas when searching. The three most common operators are AND, OR, and NOT. The operator you use will impact your search either by narrowing or broadening the number of results that are retrieved.
Use the tabs to read more about each operator, or watch the brief video below.
Using AND in between search terms is a great way to narrow down your results. For example, AND is an essential operator to find materials related to Indigenous comics studies. We can look to some of the keywords under Search Tips to the left. If we search: Indigenous AND comics, any result that is retrieved must contain both "Indigenous" and "comics."
Using AND will:
On the other hand, using the operator OR will broaden your results. This is particularly important for conducting a search related to Indigenous comics and graphic novels. Since there are overlapping terms for both the medium and the community of creators, this operator can help to ensure topical materials that use different terms will not be left out of the results.
Using OR will:
For example: comics OR comic books OR graphic novels OR comic strips OR webcomics will capture results that contain at least one of these terms.
Since there can also be overlapping terms for Indigenous peoples and communities, we can link these terms with OR as well: Indigenous OR Native OR First Nations OR Diné OR [any other specific Nation].
You can combine two search phrases in order to narrow down results that contain at least one term from each group, using () with OR and AND:
(comics OR graphic novels) AND (Indigenous OR Native)
NOT is the term to use when you want to exclude a particular term that may be related, but irrelevant, to what you are searching for. For instance, let's say you want to find articles specifically on print media comics, you can use NOT to exclude results that refer to webcomics: comics NOT webcomics.
Using NOT will:
Another helpful tool is to search a partial word using truncation. Some databases use different truncation symbols, but a common one is the asterisk *
An example of truncation for this guide would be searching Indigen* to capture results that could include both "Indigenous" and "Indigeneity." Truncation is helpful when you want to include all words with the same root.
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