I wish to honor and express my gratitude to the Indigenous peoples who cared for the lands where the majority of this guide was developed. I acknowledge that the lands that UR inhabit are the unceded ancestral territory of the Seneca Nation, known as the Onöndowa'ga or “Great Hill People” and “Keepers of the Western Door” of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy whose loss of lives, culture, knowledge, stories, and experiences are a part of Rochester, New York State, and U.S. history. May we all work collectively to combat the continued erasure of indigenous lands, life, and knowledge. For more information on how you can support preservation efforts visit ganondagan.org and senecamuseum.org.
Recommendations for finding publications related to Anthropology
Anthropology can be a very interdisciplinary subject. There are often multiple databases that will be relevant for your topic. As such I usually recommend that researchers being with an advanced search in the library website. This way you get access to most if not all the journal articles, books, and more that are relevant for your topic.
Individual databases most relevant for anthropology are included below for your information.
Once you have one (or more) useful article on a topic, use the references at the end of article to find more sources on your topic using our Citation Search tool. This helps you see what was written previous to your current article, often called citing backward.
Use Google Scholar to see who has cited your article after it was published. This helps you see what has been written after your article was published, citing forward.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License by Justina Elmore, University of Rochester.
Books and multimedia: To find books on anthropology search using DiscoverUR (use Articles, Books and more to search everything accessible to UR within our library holdings and beyond or use Library Catalog to limit to only UR collections).
Or, just see what new books in anthropology have been added to the collection.
To search for books that our library doesn't own, search:
The open web provides a plethora of resources for finding information about and from governmental and non-govermental organizations working to address issues surrounding your topic of research as well as grey literature.
What is grey literature?
Information published by entities whose main purpose is NOT publishing (government and non-government organizations, think tanks, scholarly societies and associations, etc. Watch this video for more info.)
Why is grey literature important?
A large amount of public policy information is published as grey literature.
Below are a few advanced Google searching tips for find grey literature:
Image source: Kamei, F. et al., (2020) under a CC BY 4.0 license
Finding Ethnographies
Ethnographies are written, observational science which provides an account of a particular culture, society, or community based on observation of or interactions with research subjects. Use this checklist to determine if a scholarly work is an ethnography:
✔️ Written by a trained researcher who gathered their data through participant observation, interviews, or focus groups
✔️ Published in a scholarly journal or by a scholarly press
✔️ Uses information about the culture to explain the phenomena observed in a structured, narrative way
✔️ Tells of events lived by actual individuals
✔️ Has a time period and location
Ethnographies can be found using DiscoverUR and other anthropology resources listed on this guide. Search terms to help narrow your search within these databases include: ethnograph* OR ethnology OR autoethnograph* OR "ethnographic fieldwork" OR anthro* OR cultur* OR "social life" OR "case stud*" Note: Not all ethnographies will have the word ethnography in their titles or abstracts, so you won't know for sure until you've applied the criteria above. Nor will all case studies will be ethnographies, so use the checklist above to make sure that's what you've found.
The asterisk [*] helps find multiple endings of words; ethnograph* finds you ethnography, ethnographic, ethnographer, etc.
If you’re having trouble finding ethnographies on a particular country or ethnic group, try using broader search terms (e.g. Say you are looking for research on the Pyu and haven’t found a lot, try expanding your search to Burmese OR “Burmese culture” OR Bamar). You can also add terms for the group's ethnographic region or country (e.g Myanmar OR “South* Asia*”).
Doing Ethnography
Search DiscoverUR for ethnog* research method* to find articles, books and media for best practices.
From Notes to Narrative by 
