This guide is designed to be help with research assignments in Professor Harris's POL 233 course in the Winter 2022 term -- specifically to identify appropriate scholarly or academic tools and techniques for researching the policy analysis paper assignments.

The library catalog, accessible through our homepage, can be used to find out what print and online books are available to W&L researchers.  Here are some suggestions.

If You Know a Book's Author or Title

Select Browse Search ( you may have to choose "Advanced Search" to see this) and then use the drop-down menu to:

• Browse by Author -- enter author's last name, plus some or all of the first name.  For example:  books by Westra Laura
• Browse by Title -- enter the beginning of a book's title.  For example:  titles beginning  Climate change

If You are Searching for Books on a Topic

If you are using the basic "Simple Search" (or "Search Everything"), a drop-down menu will be activated which allows you to select "Books Only."
If you are using "Advanced Search," you can select "Books Only."

You can combine words or forms of words that appear in descriptions of books.  Some examples:

• first search for books on fracking:   fracking
• better search for books on fracking:   fracking or "hydraulic fracturing"
• books containing material on legal aspects of pipeline constructions, etc.:   pipeline* AND (law* OR legal)

Doctoral dissertations are not published books, but can be considered book-length scholarly studies.
W&L subscribes to a database which offers the complete texts of over 1 million dissertations and theses.