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WRIT 1120: Pre-Search Workshop: Home

In-class activities for WRIT 1120 Pre-search workshops

What is pre-search?

Pre-Search is about being curious. During pre-search, you will gather background information and context* to:

  • increase your familiarity with the elements of your research topic or question
  • broaden or narrow your research question, if necessary
  • identify appropriate keywords or phrases to use throughout the research process. 

Background and context might include:

  • identifying widely accepted knowledge related to your topic
  • finding definitions for unknown terms or vocabulary related to your topic
  • finding examples 
  • identifying key stakeholders involved in the conversation
  • considering related concepts
  • history and/or timeline
  • statistics

*The sources you find during pre-search are not necessarily the sources you will cite in your research papers.

Example

Research Question: What factors influence the adoption of electric vehicles in the United States?

Pre-search Workshop

There is a lot of chatter online about the availability (or lack therof) of charging stations. For pre-search purposes today, you search for "electric vehicles" and charging in our eBooks Academic Collection database and find a book called Overcoming Barriers to Deployment of Plug-in Electric Vehicles. Within the book is a chapter:

In this chapter, you learn general information about the types of chargers, what it takes to install them, where they might be located, etc. You also identify a new phrase to search with: charging infrastructure.

Research Workshop

When you come back for the research workshop, we can search with the same terms "electric vehicles" and charging to find academic or research articles about this topic, but we should also try "electric vehicles" AND "charging infrastructure". Some examples of the results:

Activity 1: Generating Keywords

How to talk to databases

When using Google, you can type a sentence or question and retrieve relevant results. Databases operate differently than search engines, so they require a different search strategy for a few different reasons.

  • 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.
  • As you conduct research in library databases, you are taking part in an ongoing scholarly conversation. Scholars and professionals often use specialized vocabulary that you may not use in everyday conversation. If you're using different language than the professionals use, you may be missing out on a lot of great information. 

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' on this page to brainstorm for search terms and write down any terms you notice in the sources you find today