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HASS 103: Writing and Communications Colloquium

This guide will help students get started with their research.

Turning a Research Topic into a Search String

Keywords + Search Strategies = Search String

 

  1. Start with your Research Topic and figure out the keywords

    • Example topic: When and why did domesticated dogs evolve away from wolves?

    • Keywords:

      • Dog

      • Wolf

      • Evolution / evolve

      • Domestication

    • Start a list with these terms in your document, notebook, or wherever you keep track of things.
       

  2. Incorporate relevant search strategies (see box below)

    • Boolean operators

    • Quotations

    • Word stems

    • Parentheses
       

  3. Write out your initial search string

    • dog AND wolf AND evolution AND domestic*
       

  4. Now you're ready for a preliminary literature scan

    • Do a search using your search string and look at the results less to find articles that work (although if you do, great!) than to identify additional and/or more accurate keywords. Add these to your list and keep going, mixing and matching keywords and search strategies for best results.

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