Philosophy & Religion

You can find information on your subject by using the Mississippi State University Libraries Online Catalog & available databases. The searching strategies will work in the catalog and databases.

Two types of searches will help locate books: the "SUBJECT" and "KEYWORD" searches.

The Subject Search

Use this search when looking for books about a subject, such as Existentialism. If you are looking for information on an author, you will enter the author's name (last name, first name).

The Keyword Search

Use this search when looking for resources that you do not know the subject heading for. Keyword searching will search the entire text.

Example:
If you are searching for constitutive luck - the catalog will search for the word constitutive & luck anywhere in the document. To get the results you need, put the two words in quotation marks - "constitutive luck."

Phrases:

You will need to add quotation marks at the beginning and end of phrase.

Example:
"waste of time"

Boolean Searching (AND, OR, & NOT) to find information:

Boolean searching is used to show the relationship between words.

Example:
Deconstruction AND Derrida = results will have everything that has those two words, but not appearing in a resource individually.
Epicureanism OR Epicurus = results will include everything that includes the words together or individually in a resource.
Existentialism NOT Kierkegaard = results will include Existentialism, but will exclude any resources that include Kierkegaard.

Truncation:

By adding an asterisk (*) to find resources containing all spelled variations of a word or other endings to the root of a word. Be careful because some truncation will give you everything, meaning more than you bargained for.

Example:
epicur* = epicureanism, epicurious, epicure, epicurus, epicurean

Bad Example:
Mar* = market, marketable, marguerite, marathon, marionette, maraschino, etc.

"Woman browses books in an unknown library" by Nathan Williams/ CC BY SRR 2.0

Serendipitous Browsing leads to great finds in the library! You can do this without a computer, just take yourself to the circulating collection and look to see what you can find! Use the Library of Congress (LOC) Call Numbers given below to search the Research Services Reference Collection, as well as the circulating collection.

Areas to browse for Philosophy & Religion resources include the 3rd floor A - M room & 2nd floor Research Services for reference books. Use the LOC classification prefixes to browse in both locations in the Mitchell Memorial Library. The LOC classification system is Alpha-Numeric, meaning you will see letters and numbers to locate a book. Browse these other areas, provided in the table below, for information on your subject as well.