Define your task
What type of assignment are you doing? Are you writing an essay, report or dissertation? Or are you doing some practical research or creating a film from a piece of art? This will affect the quantity and types of information you need to gather.
Plan ahead
Form your search strategy before you begin. The more effort you put into your search strategy, the more relevant your search results will be. This will save you time in the long run.
Develop your key words
You need to identify keywords for each of the main concepts of your research topic.
The words you use to describe your topic will have a big influence on the success of your search, so it worth spending time working out all the possible variations you could use.
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Alternative keywords
Also known as synonyms. The same concept may be described in different ways. For example teenager = adolescent
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Related keywords
A concept may be similar to another concept. For example girls or boys could be used to describe male and female children or teenagers
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Broader keywords
Form your search strategy before you begin. Your topic will be part of a broader subject and it may be useful be aware of broader keywords in order to widen a search or place it in context. For example Young people describes both children and teenagers.
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Narrower keywords
There may be more specific parts of your topic that will be relevant to your research or you may need to narrow your search. For example babies and infants are more specific groups of children.
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Singular & plural keywords
Searching for the singular version of a keyword will not always bring back results containing the plural keyword. For example Searches for child may not necessarily bring back results on children.
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Keyword spellings
Searching using one way of spelling will not always bring back results containing alternative spellings. For example searches using Colour may not bring back results containing color.
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Develop your search strategy
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Boolean Operators
Linking words using AND tells the search engine to look for results that contain both of the keywords.
Linking words using OR tells the search engine to look for results that contain either of the keywords.
Linking words using NOT tells the search engine to look for results that contain one of your keyword but not the other.
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Truncation
Allows you to search for words that share a common stem by using a specific symbol e.g. comput* would search for any word containing the stem comput (e.g computer, computing, computation).
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Wildcards
Replace letters within a word e.g. wom?n would find both woman and women. Be aware that databases tend to use different symbols for truncation and wildcards, so check the database’s help section before you start.
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Phrase Searching
Allows you to search for exact terms by enclosing the search term in quotation marks (""). This returns documents containing the exact phrase e.g. “architectural conservation”.
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Complex Boolean
You can use one or more operators together e.g.(city OR urban OR town) AND regeneration. This will find documents with regeneration and any of the words city, urban or town.
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ProximitySearches
This is a way to search for two or more words that occur within a certain number of words from each other e.g. Salmon near/1 5 virus. There is a lot of variation between databases in what symbols to use, so check the database’s help section before using proximity searches.
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Fielded Searches
Search in a particular field of the document, for example the title, author or publication date. Many databases will let you select available fields to search from a drop-down menu.
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Setting Search Boundaries
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Place
Do you want to restrict your research to a specific geographic area, such as Wales or the United Kingdom?
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Time Period/Currency
Do you want to research a specific period in time such as the 20th century or 1990s? Do you need to find the most up-to-date research only or is your research less time sensitive?
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Population
Do you may want to limit your search to particular groups of the population such as men, women, children?
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Language
Do you need to limit your search to languages you can read yourself? You may also need consider whether the person marking your work would be able to read any references you include that are in other languages.
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Refine your results
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Too many results?
If you have retrieved too many results, think again about how to make your search more specific. Try using different keywords, add additional keywords, or limit your search to particular fields or publication years.
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Too few results?
If your search finds very little, try looking at the index or thesaurus of the database that you are using. This will help you to match keywords and spellings with those used in the database and may give suggestions for broader search terms. Use your results to review your search strategy. Consider using a wider range of search techniques to broaden or narrow your search results.
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