For further guidance on online searching, take a look at the Search Techniques Libguide
You will be conducting extensive research activities for this module. Crafting effective online search strategies will help you enhance your searching so that you can target appropriate sources. This will help you find the most relevant and appropriate resources and save you being overwhelmed by too many off topic search results.
The databases and search services do not understand your research topic but match on the keywords/search terms and search techniques you use, so it is worth spending time developing an appropriate search strategy.
It is useful to approach an effective online search as a three step process.
1. Identify your search terms
Before you start searching, spend some time defining your research topic.
Ask yourself:
You are likely to need to use a range of different terms and alternatives
Use whatever technique works best for you - e.g. brainstorming, words lists or mind maps etc. can help you think around your topic and identify all possible search concepts and terms.
For example
Concept 1 Oppression: race, sex social class, anti semitism etc
Concept 2 Trauma: trauma, rape, killing, abuse, harrassment etc
Cencept 3 Legal aspect: law or legal or "court proceeding" or tribunal or inquiry or inquest or legislation etc
2. Combine your search terms
It is possible to use a number of different keywords or search terms in a single search, by using operators
Operators link your search terms and define the relationship between them. This enables more accurate searching and therefore more relevant results being returned. It also saves you time as you don't have to carry out numerous similar searches where just one or two search terms are changed each time.
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AND Narrows down a search and works by looking for both terms you specify (in any order). This narrows a search as both terms must appear. e.g. inequality AND oppression |
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OR Broadens a search and works by looking for either of the terms you specify, and will find articles where either term or both terms are mentioned (in any order). This broadens a search as is useful for retrieving synonyms or variant spellings. e.g. violence OR trauma |
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NOT Excludes terms from the search. This operator isn't recommended for systematic reviews as it is highly likely you will lose relevant studies. You will need to manually filter out unwanted results. e.g. power NOT political |
3. Use search techniques to improve your search
You can use search techniques to help improve your searching.
By applying these techniques, you can increase, reduce or improve the relevancy of your search results, making it easier to access to the right materials. The most useful are truncation and phrase searching.
Truncation is a technique that broadens your search to include various word endings and spellings.
To use truncation, enter the root of a word and put the truncation symbol at the end.
The database will return results that include any ending of that root word.
For example:
Use it with care to avoid finding too many alternatives.
Phrase searching is the most limiting technique as it is used to specify that your terms must appear next to each other, and in the order you specify.
Phrase searching is commonly achieved by surrounding your phrase with quotation marks.
Phrase searching examples:
If you use a combination of AND and OR operators in one search, use parentheses (brackets) to group the OR words together so that your search is processed correctly.
Databases usually process the operators in a logical order. They typically recognise AND as the primary operator and will connect concepts with AND together first which can have unintended consequences.
For example:
If you want to find information related to violence directed at women and children, use the following instruction:
violence AND (women OR children) - This will search for violence AND BOTH women OR children
If you do not use the parentheses and search using the following:
violence AND women OR children, your search will be processed as:
Many databases offer the functionality to separate out your search terms and concepts, and this saves you having to add the parentheses. Sometimes you will have to access the Advanced Search for these options.
In this example from the Web of Science database, you can use the search form to add multiple search lines by clicking on Add row
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