Research Tools for Housing and Development: Law and Policy
Finding Books
Use Advanced Keyword Search. Select General or Title for the Search: box(es). Then put keywords relating to your project in as many boxes as you think useful. The first goal is not to find everything, but to find one really good book on your topic. Execute the search and review your results – hopefully there will be several relevant titles. Look at the Subject Headings of those titles and pick out the subject headings that are closest to your topic. If there is one Subject Heading directly on point, you can just click on that Subject Heading, and it will take you to a list of all the books that also have that Subject Heading. If there is more than one and you’d like to combine them (that is, look for books that have two or more of the same Subject Headings, go back to Advanced Search and select Subject for the Search: box(es) and put in the Subject Heading Terms.
Example: Use “housing policy” and “crime” as your initial search terms – one in each “General” box. The first result is a book called: "One Strike and You're Out": Policy in Public Housing.
The subject headings for that book are:
Crime in public housing -- United States.
Crime in public housing -- Government policy -- United States.
Housing authorities -- United States.
Public housing -- United States -- Safety measures.
You can use these subject headings to find other books on these topics.
Finding Non-Law Journals
For interdisciplinary work, start with Articles Plus. It contains articles from over 40,000 journals. If you are looking for articles from a specific journal, use the E-journals list, the Library Catalog, or Find-It! buttons to find full-text in a Library database.
Use Database Finder to locate Library databases in a particular subject. You can search by database title or browse by subject.
To configure Google Scholar to search for resources available through the University of Chicago Library, please see this guide.
