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CH 398: Research Proposals for Undergraduate Research

A guide to help you find and cite the research you need for your proposal.

Search Strategies

Use these tips to search better and find what you need more efficiently in academic databases and other tools.

While different databases might have slight differences in their use of these terms, the goal is always the same: the more thorough your search string, the more relevant your search results will be, which saves you the time of looking through articles you know you don't want.

BOOLEAN OPERATORS

Terms that connect keywords to make a search more efficient

AND

Results that include both concept A and concept B

strawberry AND banana

NOT

AND NOT

Results of concept A except those that include concept B

strawberry NOT banana

Note: Some databases (like Scopus) prefer the operator to be written as AND NOT

OR

The results of all of concept A and all of concept B

strawberry OR banana

MODIFIERS

Other helpful things to use when searching

Word stems

Variations of the base word

? (middle of the word)

wom?n = women, woman

* (end of the base word)

[engine*] = engine, engineer, engineering, engineered (etc.)

Quotations

Brings back the term or title within the quotations

Also known as "bound phrase".

"strawberry smoothie"

Parentheses

To expand your search string and include more terms

(strawberry OR banana) AND smoothie

One Way to Track What You Read: Vicky's Matrix

This is an image of the spreadsheet I used to track dozens of articles for a research article literature review. Your needs may vary, but attached below is a template of this spreadsheet for you to use yourself, if it works for you.