2. Plan your search
Step 1: Start with your assessment question
Before searching a database, be clear about the topic of your research.
Let's start with the example assessment question below. We’ll use this example to demonstrate the research steps.
What are the impacts of bushfire on wildlife in Australia?
Write your topic in your own words, this might even include expanding it. If it’s an area that’s new to you, try searching in Google or check your reading list and unit learning resources for background information first.
Step 2: Identify key concepts
The next step is to identify the key concepts of your topic. These are the concepts you'll want to find information about. These concepts become keywords or search terms you can use in databases to find articles.
Activity
Look at the topic below and click on the words that you think are the key concepts. Then check your answer.
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 are the impacts of bushfire on wildlife in Australia?
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
- impacts
- bushfire
- wildfire
- Australia
Step 3: Brainstorm alternative keywords
Aside from using key concepts to search, it’s helpful to brainstorm alternative keywords. Researchers often use different words to describe the same concept, so using other keywords means you don’t miss out on anything important. Alternative keywords might include synonyms, broader and narrower concepts.
For example, if you are looking for articles related to ‘direct air carbon capture’ and only search for that term, you may miss articles in which the authors have instead used the terms ‘DACC’, ‘carbon dioxide capture’ or ‘CO2 capture’.
Tip
Can’t think of other keywords? Find them when you are searching or reading the literature.
Activity
Let’s brainstorm alternative keywords for the concepts in our example topic. These will become the search terms you’ll use later in the module. In the box below, enter alternative keywords for 'bushfire', 'wildlife' and 'Australia'.
Here are some keywords we came up with.
- bushfire: fire, wildfire
- wildlife: animals, biodiversity, birds, koalas, parrots, fauna
- Australia: Australian, Victoria, New South Wales, Gippsland