Planning your database search
Planning your search is a key skill to set you up to find the best evidence available.
Here we will teach you how to plan and develop great searches to help you find high quality evidence for your assessments.
Step 1: Summarise your question or topic
When summarising your research topic, consider what you need to find information about. You may have one over-arching question that covers your topic, or you may have multiple smaller topics to search.
Step 2: Identify the main concepts from your topic
The next step is to identify the main concepts of your topic. These are the different ideas or themes that make up your topic. An easy way to identify the concepts is to imagine you can only google 3 or 4 words from your topic - what would they be?
Examples of concepts include:
- Settings - aged care, community, hospital, Australia
- Health issues - diabetes, autism, delirium, physical immobility
- Interventions - online app, counselling, medication management, physical therapy, mindfulness training
- People - school-aged children, fathers, college students
- Study type - clinical trials, observational studies, or qualitative studies on patient satisfaction, or lived experiences
Activity: Identify the concepts
Look at the sentence below and click on the words that you think are the main concepts. Then click Submit.
Activity overview
This interactive activity shows a research question where the user can click on the words that they consider to be the key concepts. Read the question below and think about which words are the key concepts. Research question What interventions increase physical activity in Australian adolescents? Activity: identify key concepts from a question Which words did you identify as the key concepts from the research question provided above? You can check the answers below. List of the highlighted key concepts interventions physical activity Australian adolescents
Step 3: Brainstorm synonyms or alternative keywords for your main concepts
You need to describe your topic in as many ways as possible to pick up studies from authors all around the world. Each author often has their own way of describing your topic, using different words.
A good way to begin to think about your keywords (the terms you will use to search with) is to write out the topic in your own words – this may mean rewriting an essay question or thinking about what the topic means to you.
Once you have done that, then you need to:
- List the main concepts or ideas from your rewritten topic in the Search Planner.
- Find alternative keywords to describe each concept. Alternative keywords can be synonyms, variant spellings (UK/US), acronyms, abbreviations, or any other words that are related to your topic.
- For each concept., put OR between each keyword so that the database will know to search all these as alternative options. For example: Teen OR youth.
Caution
Do not put OR between your concepts.
Example of concepts and synonyms
| Concept 1: Adolescents |
Adolescents OR adolescence OR teenagers OR teens OR youth OR young people |
|---|---|
| AND | |
| Concept 2: Australia |
Australia OR Australian OR Victoria OR Queensland OR Tasmania OR New South Wales OR Northern Territory |
| AND | |
| Concept 3: Physical activity |
Physical activity OR physically active OR sport OR exercise OR football |
Now that you've collected keywords for each concept, you're ready to pick your databases and start searching.
Tip
You can find additional keywords by searching your concepts one at a time in Google Scholar or Library Search. Scan the titles and abstracts to collect alternative keywords - you will notice other authors will use many different words to describe your concepts.