LibGuides: DUELI students: Skills for Study

Plan Your Search

Before you begin looking for resources for your assessment or research, focus on planning your search strategy. A small amount of time now will save you time and frustration later. Here are some tips on planning your search.

Video: Identifying Search Terms

The search terms you choose can greatly impact the results you find. Watch this video (01:59) for tips on choosing the best search terms for your topic.

Video: Evaluating Information Resources

Evaluating the credibility of the information you find is a key digital literacy skill. Watch this video (02:16) for some tips you can apply to evaluate information sources.

Search Planner

Before you start researching for an assessment it is a good idea to plan out your search strategy. Use this downloadable search planner to get started.

Search Planner (DOC, 35KB)

Database Tips

I'm not finding many relevant resources, how can I find more?

I'm finding too many resources, how can I narrow my search?

Advanced search techniques

Use these advanced search techniques to improve your search results.

Phrase searching narrows a search to show results that contain an exact phrase.

This is useful when you want to search for a certain string of words.

To conduct a phrase search, add double quote marks around two or more words you want to search for.

For example: searching for "health education" will only return records that contain this exact term. The search will not return results where the word "health" or "education" appear separately.

Truncation and wildcard searching broadens a search to show results that include words with variant endings or spellings.

To conduct a truncation search, use an asterix character * to indicate where the variant ending starts.

For example, searching for child* will return records that contain any of these words: child, child's, children, children's, childhood

Wildcard searching, using the symbol '?", is useful for words that have slight differences in spelling e.g. 'women' and 'woman', 'organisation' and 'organization'. Insert the ? to replace the variant letter to retrieve both versions of a word, e.g. wom?n; organi?ation.

Boolean searching allows you to combine keywords with operators (such as AND, OR, NOT) to produce more relevant results

Using the word AND between two search terms narrows a search to show results containing both terms.

Conversely, using the word OR between two terms broadens a search to show results containing either term.

Using NOT will narrow your search by excluding certain results from your search, however as the video on the next tab shows it should be used with care as this technique can remove relevant results.

Reference Your Sources

When you refer to or use someone else's publications or data in your research or teaching you should attribute the creator by providing a citation that includes information about the creator and source.

Visit the Attribution webpage to find information on how to format the attribution, where to put the attribution and examples for images, podcasts and streaming videos.

Learn about how and why we use sources in academic writing by visiting the Deakin Guide to Referencing.

Further Tips and Advice

Visit the Skills for Study page to learn more great tips, tools and techniques to support your research and studies.