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.
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.
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.
Find quality resources
To locate quality and/or scholarly information, here are two recommended strategies:
- Use the Deakin Library Search available on the Library homepage.
This ensures that you have access to the scholarly resources Deakin has arranged for you, including those provided via purchased subscriptions. - Get familiar with using Advanced Search available by clicking the Advanced Search button.
Advanced search techniques
Use these advanced search techniques to improve your search results.
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.
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.
Watch the below video (1:36) to learn more about boolean operators, and how to use them in your search.
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 project* will return records that contain any of these words: 'project', 'projects', 'projection', 'projector', etc.
Truncation can also be useful when spelling variations exist. For example, searching for organi*ation will return records that contain either of these words: 'organisation', 'organization'.
Truncation searching is sometimes referred to as wildcard searching or stemming.
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.
Search example
Below is an example showing how a researcher has combined boolean, phrase searching and truncation techniques to look for information about human resource management, projects and employee retention.
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:
"human resource management" OR HRM OR "personnel management"
AND project*
AND "employee retention" NOT train*
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, "human resource management" and "personnel management" 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, project* will also find projects, and train* will also find training, trainers, etc.
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.
Using Google and Google Scholar
Google's shaping of search results is well documented and it will affect your results. This doesn't mean you shouldn't use Google or Google Scholar, you just need to ensure these are not the only tools used in your search strategy. Be cautious and ensure you draw from discipline-specific databases also.
Be aware and beware...
Here are some reasons to be cautious when using Google and Google Scholar to search for relevant, credible, academic resources:
- Search results are not ranked according to your search criteria alone. This is because Google shapes search results based on what it knows about you from your previous searching activity.
- Search results can be influenced by wider interests including business, marketing, and political activity.
- Google Scholar results include non-academic and non-peer reviewed material.