Find quality information

You may want to get more advanced with your searching for a more thorough approach. The most common techniques are explained on this page and will work in most academic databases.

You can use these resources to build your search strategy following the steps on this page:

The first 2 steps are the same as the steps in a simple search. From Step 3 you can start to use more advanced techniques.

Summarise what it is you are searching for. It can be helpful to write this as a single sentence or question.

If you are doing an assignment, visit the Student Support webpage on Analysing the Topic for more information on this process.

Ask yourself 'what is my topic really about?' to help you identify the best keywords.

Not all of the relevant literature will use exactly the same keywords. Think about:

• possible synonyms (words that mean the same thing)
• alternative keywords
• words with variant spellings.

To find more keywords:

1. Check the terms used in any relevant documents you've already found.
2. Do a web search for synonyms. For example, synonym plastic bottle might suggest useful words.

Synonyms

Think of words or phrases that mean the same thing as the keywords in the example topic.

Variant spellings

There are often differences in British and American spelling. For example:

• counseling is used in American English
• counselling is used in Australia and Britain.

Putting different spellings in your search will help you to search more thoroughly.

Connectors (sometimes called Boolean operators) are used to combine search terms. There are three connectors: AND, OR, NOT.

AND

AND placed between words means both words must appear in each reference. This will narrow your search.

OR

OR placed between words means that any, or all, of those words may appear in each reference. This will broaden your search. When you use OR you should also place brackets around the terms which represent the same concept.

NOT

NOT means that the word you specify must not appear in any reference. This will narrow your search. Take care when you use the NOT connector – you may exclude useful references.

The truncation symbol * allows you to pick up words that have different endings. For example, comput* will retrieve computer, computers, computate, computation.

Some databases will have internal truncation for alternative spellings. For example, p?ediatric will retrieve paediatric and pediatric.

Truncation symbols (also called wildcards) vary from database to database. Some databases will automatically include plurals or variant spellings in the search. Check the database’s Help options for how it handles word variations.

If one of your search terms consists of more than one word, it can be useful to force the database to search them as a phrase to ensure you get relevant results. You will only get results where your words appears next to each other in the order you specified. This will narrow your search. You can do this by enclosing the terms in double quotation marks.

Check the database’s Help options for how it handles phrase searching.

There are different ways of doing advanced searching.

• Type your terms (including all the connectors, truncation and phrase symbols) directly into the database search box as shown in the previous section.
• Make your search in a document, then copy and paste it into different databases whenever you want to run it.
• Many databases have an Advanced Search option where there are multiple search boxes. You can select the connectors like AND and OR to build your search.
• You can run your search one section at a time in a database. Then use the Search History function to combine the previous searches into one search for your topic.

There's no right or wrong way! These methods all achieve the same results. You can do it in any way that suits your way of working.