Developing a search strategy
Step 1: Examine your question
The first step is to define what your question is. You may already have been given your assignment title, but you still need to ensure that you thoroughly understand it.
This includes:
- understanding all of the terms in your question
- knowing what depth of information you need
- considering the parameters of your research, e.g. it may cover a particular time period or geographical region
In other cases, for example when writing your thesis or dissertation, you will set your own title. In such cases, you need to think carefully about the parameters of your research:
- Is there enough literature on your topic?
- Is the scope of your topic realistic?
Step 2: Identify your key concepts
The next stage is to identify the key concepts in your question.
Key concepts are the nouns in your assignment title. These are the different chunks of meaning that define what the question is about.
Other types of terms in your question might be:
- Instruction words: normally verbs, these tell you what to do with the information about the key concepts; eg evaluate, describe, assess.
- Limiting words: these may appear in your question to restrict to a particular location, timeframe, population etc.
Examples
Assess the impact that social media has had on recent outbreaks of civil unrest
The key concepts in this assignment title are:
Step 3: Alternative search terms
The key concepts you have identified from your question are the topics you’ll be searching for.
It’s important to consider other words and phrases that might be used to describe these concepts, in order to perform a thorough search.
These alternative terms might take a number of forms:
Synonyms
Most concepts will have other words/phrases which have the same or a similar meaning as your original term.
Alternative spellings
Some terms might have different spellings, especially in American English. Wildcards allow you to do this.
Alternative endings
You might want to search for different forms of the same root word, for example plurals or different tenses. You can use truncation to help with this.
Examples
Assess the impact that social media has had on recent outbreaks of civil unrest
We’ve already identified the key concepts:
| Social media | Civil unrest |
A list of alternative search terms for this title might look like this:
| Social network | Conflict |
| Social networking | Revolution |
| Riot | |
| Web 2.0 | Rioting |
Using wildcards, we can reduce the number of search terms to:
| Social network* | Conflict |
| Revolution | |
| Web 2.0 | Riot* |
Step 4: Consider limits
Now that you have a list of search terms, you need to consider what limits apply to your search.
These limits may be dictated in your question, or you may wish to focus your research to a particular timeframe, location or field of study.
On a more practical note, you may also want to limit your search to publications in a particular language.
Examples
Let’s see how this applies to our example:
Assess the impact that social media has had on recent outbreaks of civil unrest
The word “recent” dictates that you’ll need to limit your search by date. This example leaves room for interpretation; it doesn’t specify a particular date, so it would be up to you to decide how you wanted to focus your research.
In this example, you could also choose to focus your research further by concentrating on particular instances of civil unrest, e.g. the London riots in 2012, or the Moldovan protests in 2009. This would involve adding further terms to your list of key concepts.
Step 5: Combining your terms
Now that you have your list of search terms, it’s time to put them all together to perform a search.