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Have you ever struggled to find quality results but do not know how to improve your searches?
The aim of this guide is to help you to search more effectively. It covers:
This guide is aimed at undergraduates but is suitable for any level of study.
Click on the image below to work through the online tutorial for creating a search strategy. There are activities for you to take part in along the way.
When you search for information, you can link your keywords together with Boolean operators. The main ones which are used in searching are: OR, AND and NOT.
OR is used in a search to broaden out the results. When you combine your keywords with OR, you will get more results, as you are saying any of the keywords can be found.
It's important to think about all the ways an author could have described a topic, in order to make sure all of the possible useful research articles come back in your search. So once you've identified the main keywords you can use OR to search for them all.
In literature searching, this helps with sensitivity, as it shows you are trying to find all of the relevant research for your topic.
For example: handwashing OR hand hygiene / teenager OR adolescent
You can use AND in a search to reduce the number of results you get. It should make the results more specific to your research topic as it ensure the results which come back contain all of keywords you have listed.
In literature searching this helps with specificity as it shows you have conducted a focussed search.
For example: handwashing AND hospital infection / teenager AND smoking
In advanced literature searching, you would first broaden out your search with OR, and then narrow it down using AND.
For example: (Handwashing OR hand hygiene) AND (hospital infection OR inpatient infection)
Using NOT in a search will exclude results from your search and will give you less results.
For example: hospital acquired infection NOT community acquire infection
Be careful when using NOT, as it might exclude something which you are actually interested in (if the keyword that you have excluded is also mentioned in research which includes keywords that you would like to come back).
The short video below explains how to search with the Boolean operators using some example topics.
Before you start to do any research it is important to think about your topic. This could be a question or it could be a research area. Then, you need to think about how this question or topic will fit into a search strategy and this involves thinking about the main keywords you are interested in.
The next step is to think about those main keywords in more detail. Think ... are there other ways to say them (synonyms)? For the best results you need to identify as many synonyms for each concept. There might be lots of other ways to say your keywords or there may only be one way. Don't forget about alternative spellings (UK/US) and abbreviations.
Sometimes it can be difficult to think of alternative keywords for your topic. If you struggle to identify additional keywords for your search terms you could:
Finding the most effective keywords for your search usually involves some trial and error. However, you can continue to add to your list of keywords as you find out more about your topic.
There are a number of advanced searching techniques you can use to improve the thoroughness of your searches.
The symbols used for these advanced searching techniques may change depending on which database you are searching, so make sure to check the online help in the databases, for more information.
The main advanced searching techniques used are: truncation, phrase searching and wild cards.
Truncation is also known as “stemming”. You can use it to search for a term and variant endings of that term, by substituting the letters at the end of the word for an asterisk (*). Your search then finds every word that begins with the letters you have entered.
For example, handwash* will retrieve handwash, handwashing / anxi* will retrieve anxious and anxiety
You can use double speech marks ("") when you want to find an exact phrase. This will only find documents where those words appear next to each other and in the same order.
For example, "healthcare workers” / "aerobic exercise"
You can also use truncation and phrase searching together. This can be useful when you want to use phrase searching but still pick up the various endings, including plurals.
As only the exact phrase is searched for, a search for “Health care worker” would not find the plural health care workers. To overcome this issue, you could use truncation within your phrase, “health care worker*”.
Also a search for “hand wash*” would keep your two keywords together, in the same order, as well as finding hand washing.
You can use wild cards to create searches with unknown characters or multiple spellings. The symbols which are generally used for wild cards are the question mark, the hashtag, and the asterisk.
The question mark usually matches exactly one character. For example, ne?t would find neat nest or next.
The hash tag usually matches one optional character, which can be useful for UK and US spellings. For example colo#r (colour, color) and p#ediatric (paediatric, pediatric).
As well as being used for truncation, the asterisk can sometimes be used for multiple characters within a word too. A search for ch*ter would find charter, character and chapter.
Guidance on how to use advanced searching techniques in a search, is covered in the short video below:
Discovery is a useful resource to use to get started with searching for literature. It searches the wealth of our library collections and many of our academic databases simultaneously. There are a couple of short videos below, to help you get started with searching in Discovery.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.