2. Plan your search
Take a moment before you start researching to think about what you are trying to find.
Your Task
Work through this checklist below
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. Approach your search with these simple steps.
Tip
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.
Combine your Keywords with some Database Search Techniques
Once you’ve chosen your keywords, join them together using search techniques to create a search strategy. Use the tabs below to learn about some common database search techniques.
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 quotation marks around two or more words you want to search for.
For example: searching for "mental health" will only return records that contain this exact term. The search will not return results where the word 'mental' or 'health' appear alone.
