In this module, you will learn to:
Once you have developed your research question and identified some sources, you need to develop a search strategy that will enable you to locate materials in order to address your research question. You could always search by typing in one or two keywords related to your concepts, but a well built search statement will help you find relevant results quickly and more effectively.
There are couple of "techniques" to improve your search, such as Boolean Operators (AND, OR and NOT), exact phrase search, truncations, and subject headings (i.e. the indexed terms in a database). Follow the suggested steps below to get an idea of building a search statement. These techniques can be used in OneSearch and many other article databases.
Selecting and using keywords from Joshua Vossler [3:50]
Step 1. Select keywords from your research question/topic
Watch the video "Selecting and using keywords" to learn how to pick keywords from a research question and how many keywords work the best.
Let's assume you are interested to research the impact of the revitalization of historical buildings in Hong Kong. The keywords you picked are:
| revitalization, historical buildings, Hong Kong |
Step 2. Connect your keywords with "AND"
Use AND to combine the keywords so that the search results will include all these keywords. AND helps narrow your search.
Use quotation marks " " to enclose the phrase if you hope to search the terms as a phrase (exact the same wording). " " also narrows your search and make your search more precise, but sometimes may yield very few results.
| revitalization AND "historical building" AND "Hong Kong" |
returns 134 results in OneSearch, as of Sept 2019
You can use OneSearch Advanced Search or other article databases (e.g. Web of Science, Scopus) to build your search statement.
Step 3. Add synonyms and combine them with "OR"
You might miss out certain articles if the keywords selected were not those used in research papers. Think what could be other alternative keywords authors used in their papers and add them as keywords too. Use OR to combine the alternative keywords (or synonyms) so that articles containing at least one of the keywords will be included in the results. OR helps broaden your search.
Use parentheses ( ) to enclose the phrase to specify the order (terms within parentheses will be executed first and then AND).
| (revitalization OR revitalizing) AND ("historical buildings" OR "old buildings") AND "Hong Kong" |
returns 373 results in OneSearch, as of Sept 2019
Step 4. Refine your search statement
Don't target for a perfect search statement at your first try. It is very common to refine your search statement until you retrieve a manageable number of relevant results. You may discover new keywords or even refine your research topic during the searching process.
For example, you may consider narrowing down to one aspect after several rounds of searching.
| (revitalization OR revitalizing) AND ("historical buildings" OR "old buildings") AND "Hong Kong" AND "social impact" |
returns 25 results in OneSearch, as of Sept 2019
Step 5. Refine your search results
At any stage of searching, you can always refine your search results by applying filters, e.g. limit to "peer-reviewed journals", a publication year range, etc. You will see the similar filter options in many other article databases.
Read More Search Tips below to learn more about Boolean Operators, Truncations, Wildcards, Exact Phrase search, and keywords/subject heading search.
AND combines search terms so that each result contains all of the terms. AND narrows your search.
e.g.: youth AND drug finds articles that contain both youth and drug.
OR combines search terms so that each result contains at least one of the terms. OR is often used to connect synonyms or similar concepts. OR broadens your search.
e.g.: youth OR teenager finds articles that contain either youth or teenager or both.
NOT excludes terms so that each result does not contain the term that follows it. NOT narrows your search.
e.g.: drug NOT alcohol finds articles that contain drug but exclude alcohol.
E.g.
Truncations (*) and wildcards (?, #) are used to include different spellings therefore broadens your search.
E.g.:
Truncation and wildcard symbols may vary by database. Check the Help page in the database to learn the symbols and operators that database supports. (or, google database name + "operator" to locate the search help page directly)
Phrase search is used to search the specific expression or concepts. Usually quotation marks "" are used to search the exact phrase. Phrase search narrows your search.
E.g.
In some databases, quotation marks cannot be used with truncation or wildcards. e.g.: "knowledge shar*". Do check the Help page in the database to learn the symbols and operators that database supports.
| Keyword searching | Subject Heading searching |
|
Keywords are natural language words or phrases that describe the search topic. Keyword searching looks for the keywords in any field of the record (if not specified). |
Subject headings are a group of "controlled vocabularies" that describe the content of each item. These controlled vocabularies are usually given by subject specialists or indexers. Subject heading searching looks for the subject heading terms in the subject heading field (e.g. Subject, Subject Terms) of the record. Commonly used subject headings include MeSH and Emtree, both are used to search biomedical literature. |