Finding resources
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. Use the downloadable search planner below to get started.
Click through the slides below to learn how to approach your search use these simple steps.
Combine your keywords with 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 "latent fingerprints" will only return records that contain this exact term. The search will not return results where the word 'latent' or 'fingerprints' appear alone.
Truncation searching broadens a search to show results that include words with variation.
To conduct a truncation search, use an asterisk character * to signify where the variation should exist.
Use this when you want to show results that include words with different endings. For example, searching for impact* will return records that contain any of these words: 'impact', 'impacts', 'impactful', 'impacting' etc.
Truncation searching is sometimes referred to as wildcard searching or stemming.
Boolean searching is a type of search that allows users 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.
Check out the video (3:04) below to discover tips for effective search strategies.
Database search example
Below is an example of an advanced search option you’ll find in most databases. It has multiple search boxes with the Boolean operator, AND, listed on the left-hand side. Each concept has been entered into a search box and joined by AND.
Click on the +plus icons to learn about each search technique demonstrated.
Activity overview
This interactive activity shows an image of the Library advanced search bars filled in with an example search as follows:
"climate change"
AND extinction OR endangered
AND australia*
There are 3 selectable icons that explain each of the search techniques used in this advanced search.
Technique 1: Grouping your words
Use Quotation marks to search for words in an exact order. This is called phrase searching.
Technique 2: Operators
Using the OR word between terms broadens a search to show results that contain any of the terms. Using AND narrows the search to show results that contain all of the terms.
Technique 3: Using symbols
Add an asterisk to the end of a keyword to find variant word endings. This is called truncation. This example of australia* will find australia, australian, Australians.