Used to typing in a phrase in Google and getting results? You could do this in a library database, but you'll be sifting through unnecessary and irrelevant results if you do. Having a strategy simply helps you make the most of your research the first time around.
Having a search strategy can...
Make your research more efficient & effective.
Save time--you won't have to sift through thousands of results to find one good article!
Get you better results, and therefore a better grade.
Searching your entire research question in a database often doesn't work - leaving you with either 0 results or hardly anything of use. This is because databases have specific syntax that they require users to input in order for them to search effectively. One of the first steps in making a database search more effective is breaking your topic out into keywords.
For example, if you are looking for articles to address your research question:
What are the impacts of the fishing industry's use of nets on ocean pollution levels?
If we search the whole question in a database (in this case, Academic Search Premier), we get no results.
If, however, we break out that topic into keywords and try searching again...
Fishing
Nets
Pollution
You'll see we're a lot more successful in finding potentially relevant sources!
Boolean Search Operators are useful in joining together search keywords to narrow down your results and factor in potential synonymous terms. Learn more about the three operators and how they can be used in the video below.
You can search for variant word endings of a shared or common word stem by adding an asterisk (*) to the end of a keyword. This is a way that you can shorten your search strand, especially if you find yourself using OR often for words that begin with the same stem.
For example, if you're interested in finding articles that are related to cancer prevention, some keywords you could include would be:
prevent OR prevented OR preventing OR prevention OR preventative OR preventive
AND
cancer
However, the first line of keywords all begin the same way - so to save yourself some time (and effort), you could just add an asterisk to the common word stem, and the database will automatically search for all potential word endings.
prevent*
AND
cancer
As you can see, truncating not only made the search string more brief, but it actually also increased our results by a small margin.
NOTE - truncation is user-controlled, so you will have to remember to add the asterisk to your keywords as you search. The database will not automatically do this for you!
Databases don't always understand when search phrases are meant to be searched together, and so if you don't specify that some terms are a phrase, they may assume you mean to put 'AND' between all of your keywords.
In order to correct for this, surround all multiple-word key phrases in your search with quotation marks.
For example...
If you search ocean pollution... the database will think you meant ocean AND pollution
If you search "ocean pollution"... the database will know exactly what you meant!
This helps cut down your results and to make sure your results are more relevant to your terms.
In order to force the order of your database search, combine your synonymous OR terms in parentheses and leaving the ANDs outside of each parentheses group. This is similar to the PEMDAS rule in mathematics - databases will run sections of the search in parentheses first, and it is a way of separating out your key concepts.
(term OR term OR term OR term) AND (other term OR other term OR other term)
If we DON'T nest our like terms in parentheses, the database will get confused by which terms you want included in the results (the ANDs) and which terms can be interchangeable with one another (the ORs).
Unnested Search |
fishing OR fisher* OR "fishing industry" OR overfishing AND pollution OR contamination OR waste
|
Nested Search |
(fishing OR fisher* OR "fishing industry" OR overfishing) AND (pollution OR contamination OR waste)
|
As you can see, not nesting your terms leads to your search getting WAY MORE results than it should!
Limits are helpful in focusing your search. Once you've done your initial search you can use some limits to help you narrow your results to a more manageable amount of information.
Date: limit results to a specific time frame
Peer review: limit to only peer-reviewed articles
Full text: find only the articles available in full text **TIP: you can request an article that isn't available through Interlibrary Loan
Publication type: limit results to meta analysis, reviews, systematic reviews, research articles, and evidence based practice.
Some databases have their own specific terminologies that they use for advanced search capabilities.
Two examples of this are PubMed (which uses Medical Subject Headings, or MeSH) and CINAHL (which uses CINAHL Subject Headings). The tutorials below are available if you're interested in learning more about these methods.
