LGBTQ+ Resources

Library Search is a great place to start looking for LGBTQ+ scholarly resources. But first you need to think about how to use and combine your search terms and filters to get the most relevant results for your interests.

Take a look at our Search Skills Guide for lots of tips on how to effectively manage your search terms for the most relevant results. Some examples of how you might incorporate these search strategies for LGBTQ+ research:

• The vocabulary of queer studies and LGBTQ+ topics and identities is broad and diverse. Use the glossaries and reference works to build up a list of terms relevant to your research topic and include alternative terms, synonyms and phrases that denote variations of meaning. 
• Boolean connectors: once you have your list of terms, you need to think about how to connect them using search engine logic. Use AND to narrow or focus your results, OR to broaden your results, or NOT to exclude certain terms. 
• Sorting and filtering: once you have a list of relevant-looking results, there may be a lot of them so this is when to start using the filters on the left hand side. Useful ones to start with are the 'item' and 'subject' filters. For example, you may want to filter your results to only Ebooks, or peer-reviewed journal articles. You can also sort your results by date, starting with the most recent publications. 
• Truncation commands are a quick and easy tool that enables Library Search (and most academic databases) to search for multiple variations of a word at once without you having to type them all out. It works by placing an asterisk after the root spelling of the word. So for example entering sexual* into the search engine will return results that feature all the following words: sexual, sexuality, sexualities, sexualise, sexualize, sexualised, sexualized, sexualisation, sexualization.
• Phrase searching: If you have two or more words that you want to find next to one another in your results, search for them as a complete phrase by placing them in double quotation marks. For example "bisexual erasure". Try running your phrase search both with and without double quotation marks to notice the difference in the number and relevance of results.