NPTCLibGuides: Hairdressing &amp; Applied Therapies: Tips for finding information

Search Strategy

Plan ahead

This will save time and effort in the long run. Spend time clarifying your task and developing your search strategy before attempting any research or writing.

Break it down

Be clear about what you want to find out. Break down your title and pick out concepts to use as keywords in your search

Know Your Subject

When starting your research it is useful to use subject encyclopaedias and dictionaries to help you get a basic understanding for your topic. This background reading will give you ideas for concepts and keywords. Consider other possible words or phrases that might be used to describe your subject and produce a list of keywords. This may include synonyms and related terms, American terms or spellings, plurals, acronyms and abbreviation.

Advanced search techniques

Once you have planned your search, choose which search engine or library database you are going to use. Don’t just type in your assignment title!

Try different search engines for different results
Leave out ‘stop’ words such as is, the, to, in, if they’re not important
Use 2 or more keywords
Put the most important keyword first, e.g. if you want information on coastal pollution in the UK, you might use the following keywords in this order: Coastal pollution UK

Some databases and search engines use a truncation symbol to pick up words with variant endings. Using a truncation symbol will broaden your search by picking up different word endings and spellings.

Place an asterisk at the end of the word stem * e.g.

manag* will find any word containing manag - manage, manager, managing, and management
child* will find any word containing child - childhood, children, children’s and childbirth

Not all databases use an asterisk* as the truncation symbol. Use the database help section to check which symbol to use.

A wildcard is a symbol which will replace a single letter in a word. This is useful if the word is spelled in different ways

Replace a letter with a question mark e.g.

wom?n will find woman or women
col?r will find colour, or colour

Not all databases use a question mark ? as the wildcard symbol. Use the database help section to check which symbol to use.

Use double quotation marks to enclose your search terms for exact phrase searching. This will limit the number of results you get as only results where the words appear next to each other are returned.

Enclose your phrase in quotation marks:

e.g. "financial impact"

Your results will be more specific and relevant to your search.

Search in a particular field of the document, for example the title, author or publication date. Many databases will let you select available fields to search from a drop-down menu.

image of guided search in database

With the Advanced Search function, you can refine your results using techniques such as exact phrase searching. You can also search for pages that contain one of several search terms, e.g. Britain OR UK.

The Advanced search page is an easier way for you to use all the advanced search techniques we looked at earlier, without having to remember any of them!

Combine your keywords: use Boolean Operators…

The three basic Boolean operators are AND, OR, NOT

You will get a better set of results if you connect your keywords using Boolean operators. We use them to focus a search, particularly when the topic contains several search terms. They: