WRIT 1120: Seminar in Research Writing: Search Strategies

Databases are more structured than internet search engines.

• In a search engine, your search terms can match words in the full text or the entire web site.
• In a database, your search terms need to match words in the data that describe the article such as the article title, the journal title, and the abstract (overview) of the article, not necessarily the full text.

Thus, we recommend that you:

• carefully select the key concepts from your research question and combine those as keywords to search in a database
• use the worksheet labeled 'generating and combining keywords' below to brainstorm search terms

While these concepts are described in the boxes in the right column on this page, you may prefer to watch videos to learn about these database search tips.

Why combine keywords?

• AND, OR, and NOT (called Boolean operators) combine your keywords together to either narrow or broaden your set of results

Using AND

• narrows your results
• tells the database that ALL search terms must be present in the resulting records
• Be aware:   
  • In many databases, the AND is implied. For example, Google automatically puts an AND in between your search terms.
  • Though all your search terms are included in the results, they may not be connected together in the way you want.
    • For example, this search:  college students test anxiety  is translated to:  college AND students AND test AND anxiety. The words may appear individually throughout the resulting records.

Using phrase searching

• place quotation marks around two or more words that you want to search as a phrase, rather than separate words 
  • example: "college students" AND "test anxiety"

Using OR

• connects two or more similar concepts (synonyms)
• broadens your results, telling the database that ANY of your search terms can be present in the resulting records
  • example: cloning OR genetics OR reproduction

Using NOT

• excludes words from your search
• narrows your search, telling the database to ignore concepts that may be implied by your search terms
  • example:  cloning NOT sheep

Truncation

• broadens your search to include various word endings and spellings
• to use truncation, enter the root of a word and put the truncation symbol at the end
• Truncation symbols may vary by database; common symbols include: *, !, ?, or #
  • examples: child* = child, childs, children, childrens, childhood