Planning 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 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.
So write down your summary and check that it's clear and focused.
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 quotation marks around two or more words you want to search for.
For example: searching for "shear coefficient" will only return records that contain this exact term. The search will not return results where the word 'shear' or 'coefficient' appear alone.
Citation tracking
Citation tracking is used to discover the number of times a particular article has been cited. It can be a useful way to locate additional resources on your topic.
Think about a research article as one element within a larger, ongoing conversation among researchers. That research article represents one researcher’s ideas and findings at a given point in time.
Citation tracking techniques allow you to use that article to trace the timeline of an idea backward and forward in time. In this way you can discover other relevant resources for your research or assessment.
Engineering search example
Below is an example showing how a researcher has combined boolean, phrase searching and truncation techniques to look for information about 3D printing, biomaterials and metal alloys.
This was created on Deakin Library's Advanced Search screen, but you could implement the same techniques when searching with other tools like Google Scholar or databases.
Click the plus (+) icons below to reveal more information about the searching techniques used.
Activity overview
This interactive activity shows an image of the Library advanced search bars filled in with an example search as follows:
“3d printing” OR “additive manufacturing”
AND biomaterial*;
AND “metal alloy*” NOT polymer*
There are 3 selectable icons that explain each of the search techniques used in this advanced search.
Technique 1: Phrase searching
Databases typically search for words individually. To make sure that they search for keywords as a phrase, apply a symbol such as a double quotation marks (" "), at the beginning and end of the keyword phrase.
In this example, "nicotine replacement therap*" will find results containing these words in this exact phrase and not find results that contain these words individually.
Technique 2: Truncation
Often synonyms are based on a similar root word with a different ending. Applying a symbol, such as an asterisk (*), at the end of a keyword includes additional words with different endings and spellings.
In this example, biomaterial* will also find biomaterials.
Technique 3: Boolean operators
Boolean operators use capitalised words (such as AND, OR, NOT) to produce more relevant results, when searching in a database.
Using AND between words finds results containing those words.
Using OR between words finds results containing any of those words.
Using NOT before a word excludes results containing that word.