Use this online tutorial to help you understand the importance of evaluating the quality of the information sources you use in your academic work.
Before you start searching, spend some time defining your research topic. Ask yourself, what is it that you want to find out? What search terms or keywords will find this information?
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.
Take a look at the short video to help you begin:
For more guidance, see the Search Techniques guide.
The three most commonly used operators are AND, OR, NOT. These are known as Boolean operators. They can be used to broaden or narrow a search and to exclude unwanted concepts.
Watch the video to find out how to use these operators.
For more guidance, see the Search techniques guide.
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.
The asterisk * symbol is most commonly used for truncation. However, check out the help screens as !, ?, or # may also be used.
For example:
entrepreneur* will find entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial etc.
child* will find child, children, childlike, childhood etc.
Use it with care to avoid finding too many alternatives.
Wildcards are similar to truncation but they are used to substitute for a single letter or no letter in a word.
They broaden your search by including variant word spellings.
The question mark symbol is most commonly used. However, check out the help screens as ! , *, or # may also be used.
For example:
wom?n will find woman and women
optimi?ation will find optimisation and optimization
model?ing will find modeling and modelling
For more, see the Search tips guide.
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.
Always check the Database Help screens, as some databases may use different symbols.
Phrase searching examples:
"World Trade Organization"
"influencer marketing"
For more, see the Search tips guide.