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Research Skills: 03 Search strategies

Plan your search strategy

Before starting your research, stop and think about the sort of information you really need. Developing a good search strategy will help you not only find information that is relevant, but will also save you time and get you better results. Your strategy can be applied to any library resource, database or internet search engine. 

The first step is to READ your assignment carefully and check the marking criteria. 

  • Analyse the question. What exactly are you being asked to write?
  • Scope - What do you need to find out?
  • Content - Do you need to include certain resources such as peer-reviewed articles, statistics etc.?
  • Context - Why is this interesting? From what angle are you going to examine the topic?
  • Purpose - Why are you writing this? Can you choose your own topic?

Downloading the following plan and using the tips on this page will help you to plan an effective search strategy  

Keywords & key concepts

Identifying and creating a list of key concepts and key words through your background reading is an important part of your research strategy. Just typing your title into Google will not get you the best or most focused results!

Check unfamiliar words and concepts in a dictionary; Credo is great for this. Keep adding to your list as you read more complex and in-depth articles. 

Think of synonyms (words with similar meaning such as shout and yell) and include abbreviations as well as full versions.

 

 

Need more help?

Use our Ask a Librarian service or email us: libraries@nptcgroup.ac.uk 

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: 

  • connect search words to narrow or broaden our results
  • focus a search when we have multiple search terms
undefined Remember to capitalise your Boolean operators because most search engines will ignore common (stop) words, such as ‘and’, ‘or’.
 
 
 
Use AND to narrow your results

Linking words using AND tells the search engine to look for results that contain both. 

The darker area represents the information that you want, with both the word puppy and the word kitten in them.

 

Use OR to broaden your results

Linking words using OR tells the search engine to look for results that contain either of the keywords 

Your search will return results containing either or both words

Use NOT to exclude words from your results

Linking words using NOT tells the search engine to look for results that contain one of your keywords but not the other.

  • use with caution as you may exclude information that could be useful

  • Google uses the minus sign for NOT

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!

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