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Performance: Dance and Drama

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

Now 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 "portrait photography" will only return records that contain this exact term. The search will not return results where the word "portrait" or "photography" 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 photograph* will return records that contain any of these words:  photograph, photographic, photography, photographer.

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. 
 

Activity

Click the hotspot icons in the search screenshots below to reveal more information about each part of the search strategy.

Example 1:

You need to find articles that discuss the work of Trisha Brown. Remember the steps outlined above when first planning your search?  Unpack your topic and break it up into the different concepts. Then think of some related words for each concept.
A literature search using techniques such as boolean (AND, OR), phrase searching (using quotation marks) and truncation (using the asterisk) might look like this:

In the above search example, the choreographer’s name has been combined with keywords relating to dance and performance. The connector ‘OR’ has been used to combine three alternative words which will broaden the search results. An asterisk is used to search for different word endings, for example choregraph* will search for choreographer, choreography and choreographic.

There may not be many (if any) published articles on new artists or less well established dancers or choreographers. In this case, it is best to search for broad themes or principles within dance or performance, and apply them to the performer you are researching.

Example 2:

You need to find articles discussing the theatre company The Wooster Groups' appoaches to rehearsal.  Here's what a search might look like - note the use of one search box per concept and its related terms.

In the above search example, the theatre group's name has been combined with words relating to both theatre and also rehearsal. The connector ‘OR’ has been used to broaden the search to include articles and book relating to theatre, drama and also performance. A third line has added the concept rehearsal, to narrow the search results to only books and articles related to that aspect of the topic, rather than all the books and articles about the Wooster Group.

It's a good idea to include as many relevant terms as you can think of to increase your chances of getting relevant articles. You may need to play around with different keywords to get the best results for your search.