Planning your search
Before you begin looking for resources for your assessment or project, focus on planning your search strategy. A little time spent on this now will save you time and frustration later. Here are the steps:
Summarise your question or topic
This sounds obvious, but to begin searching you should be clear about the topic of your research or assessment.
If this is for an assessment, ensure you review your assessment instructions. You may already have received a topic, a statement or clues to guide your search.
Write down a summary of your topic and check that it's clear and focused. This will help guide you in the sort of information you are looking for.
Identify the keywords
Highlight, underline or circle the keywords or main concepts in your summary. These words can help you build your search strategy and set parameters.
Think of alternative search words for each concept
These can be synonyms, related words, abbreviations, acronyms and other words that are specific to your topic.
To discover synonyms, refer to a thesaurus (such as https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus) and see what other words could be used.
Doing this will ensure that you don't miss out on any useful articles that you might otherwise miss if you only use one or two search terms.
Be clever
Now you have a strong basis for your search, it doesn't stop there.
Improve your search strategy using special characters and symbols to create clever search strings. There is more detail about these advanced techniques in the section below.
Document your search
This will help you plan your search properly and remember the techniques.
Download the planner below and follow the steps to create your own search strategy.
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.
Video: What are boolean operators (1:36)
Search examples
Below are some examples showing search strings that combine the techniques described above.
These were created using Advanced Search from the Library homepage, but you could also implement the same techniques using Advanced Search in other databases.
Click the plus (+) icons to reveal more information about each part of the search strategy.
Example 1:
Let's say we are looking for articles that discuss how self-determination influences the wellbeing of Indigenous patients within primary care settings. Remember what we talked about in Planning your search? First unpack your topic and identify the main concepts, thinking also of some additional terms for each of those concepts. Here's what a search might look like - note the use of one search box per concept and its related terms.
Activity overview
This interactive activity shows an image of the Library advanced search bars filled in with an example search as follows:
"Self-determination" OR "Community Control"
AND wellbeing OR "well being"
AND "primary care"
There are 4 plus icon hotspots that explain the search techniques used in this advanced search.
Hotspot 1: Self-Determination Concept
One of our main concepts is Self-Determination. We type in "Self-Determination" with double quotation marks to search for these words as one search term. We add related words like "Community Control" and combine them with Self Determination using OR. This tells the database that results with one or both of these search terms will be relevant to our topic.
Hotspot 2: Searching with fields
If you get too many results you can limit your search terms so that they appear in a particular field. You can choose either TITLE or ABSTRACT.
Hotspot 3: Combining different concepts with AND
For each of your different concepts, we use AND to combine these into one search. This tells the database that we need results which include at least one search term from all of our concepts.
Hotspot 4: Additional keywords
When thinking about additional keywords, consider whether there are alternate ways to describe your concepts. In this case, wellbeing can be written as one or two words, so it's beneficial to include both options. The database will find results that match your search terms, so think alternative spelling, acronyms, abbreviations, and any other related words.
In the above search example, we have included the main term for 'Self-Determination' and added the related term 'Community Control', because both terms will help us find relevant results. We have included the spelling variations of 'wellbeing and 'well being' because authors may use different spelling for the same idea. We have used OR to group our related terms together and AND to combine our 3 different concepts into one search.
Referencing your sources
It's important to correctly reference all your sources referred to in your writing. Here are some reasons for doing so:
- Shows how widely you have read
- Enables the reader to locate the sources you have referred to
- Supports and strengthens your arguments
- Demonstrates academic integrity
Deakin's Referencing Guide will guide you in how to correctly format all your citations and references.