Using the Syllabus Finder
Getting Started
The Syllabus Finder works just like a search engine, e.g. Google (after which it was modeled and from which it derives much of its power). You simply type into the main box the search terms you wish to find in a matching syllabus and click on the "search" button. To narrow your search further, try to add distinct terms. For instance, a search for "civil war" will bring up many syllabi on the American Civil War but also syllabi on numerous other civil wars (unfortunately, there have been many of them). Try adding "american" or "united states" to your search terms.
It is also very helpful to add keywords related to the department or discipline you wish to focus on. For instance, just entering "java" as your search term will return results having to do with the history and politics of Indonesia as well as the computer programming language Java. For the latter, try adding "computer science" in quotation marks to the search box. Please read the search tips below for other helpful hints, such as using book titles to find related syllabi.
The results page will show you up to 10 matches, with subsequent pages showing additional matches, if available. (Because of certain restrictions placed upon the Syllabus Finder by Google, it can only return a maximum of 10 results per page.) The quality of matches declines as you go along, i.e. matches 1-10 will likely be much more relevant than matches 81-90. The Syllabus Finder is not perfect; sometimes it will produce an odd result near the top, and the number of such off-topic matches will increase as you click through successive pages.
On the results page each matching syllabus may include additional pieces of information, such as the university or college the syllabus comes from, the size of the syllabus in kilobytes, an excerpt from Google, an excerpt from the Center for History and New Media's cache of that syllabus, and an attempted extraction of all of the assigned books on the syllabus. (That last feature is currently experimental.) If you wish to see only some of that information, try using the advanced search.
Search Tips
- The more specific you can be, the better. For example, a search for "history 'civil war' american" returns many syllabi that cover the American Civil War in some way, including survey courses that may begin or end with that war but cover a lot of other material. If you are only interested in courses that focus on the American Civil War, try adding terms like "1861-1865" or "gettysburg 'bull run' appomattox."
- Frequently the best search terms are books that are highly likely show up on the syllabi you're interested in. For instance, if you are looking for syllabi on developmental psychology, those two words work fine but since many courses use the textbook The Lifespan by Guy R. Lefrancois, you could also try "lefrancois lifespan."
- Building on strategy #2, it is also effective to list the last names of several authors that are likely to be used on a syllabus. For example, "melville hawthorne twain" is very effective if you wish to see syllabi on American literature.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does the Syllabus Finder sometimes return web pages that are not syllabi?
Unlike human-sorted collections of syllabi, the Syllabus Finder and associated databases are fully automated. To the search engine and processing algorithms, some pages look a lot like syllabi but aren't. For instance, a page might have many words or phrases that are extremely likely to show up on a syllabus, such as "office hours," "requirements," "readings," "assignments," etc. If so, that page may be improperly catalogued as a syllabus.
Why doesn't my syllabus show up in the Syllabus Finder?
The converse of FAQ #1 is that some syllabi don't look like syllabi to the Syllabus Finder and so aren't found. Syllabi that use a lot of graphics (especially without using the "alt" attribute in the image tag) or those with few keywords that tend to show up on syllabi sometimes are not catalogued as such. However, it is much more likely that a syllabus isn't showing up because a) it hasn't been indexed by Google yet; b) it is stored on a gated server and so can't be indexed by Google; or c) it is stored on a non-.edu server (the Syllabus Finder restricts its search to the .edu domain).