Writing an essay or dissertation involves many things, but the first step is always conducting research. The initial stage in this, moreover, is finding sources, which is why a good search strategy will help to provide strong foundations for the rest of your work.
What Is a Search Strategy?
To find the most relevant sources for any project, it’s important to search systematically. A ‘search strategy’ is where we set out the databases and techniques used to identify sources.
For longer essays, like PhD theses or meta-analyses, you may also be required to document your search strategy. This will help your reader to understand how the study was conducted.
1. Picking Your Search Terms
Developing a search strategy begins with identifying search terms. These are keywords related to your essay topic that you’ll use to find relevant sources.
For instance, if you were writing about puppies, one of your keywords would be ‘puppy’. But to make sure that you don’t miss relevant articles in a database, you’d also search for synonyms and related terms, like ‘canine’, ‘small dog’ and ‘pooch’.
You can find alternative keywords by using a thesaurus, but it also helps to check which terms have been used by previous studies in the same subject area.
2. Truncation and Wildcards
The symbols used for truncations and wildcards differ from database to database, but both functions will help you find sources that you might otherwise miss:
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- Truncation
Truncation refers to using a shortened version of a term to find variants. For instance, if a truncation is indicated with a ‘*’ symbol, searching for ‘pupp*’ would bring up any documents containing this term and variations of it (e.g. ‘puppy’, ‘puppies, ‘puppyhood’, etc.)
- Wildcards
Like truncations, wildcards use a symbol to let you widen a search. This can be very useful for finding alternative spellings of the same word. If a wildcard is represented by a ‘?’ symbol, for example, searching for ‘col?r’ would return both ‘colour’ and the US spelling ‘color’.
3. Combining Search Terms
To refine your search, you’ll often need to combine search terms. We usually do this with boolean operators, the most common being ‘AND’, ‘OR’ and ‘NOT’.
Searching a database for ‘puppies AND kittens’, for instance, would return articles that mention both puppies and kittens, while ‘puppies OR kittens’ would find articles that mention either and ‘puppies NOT kittens’ would identify those which mention only puppies.
4. Limiting Searches
As well as combining search terms, you can make a search more precise by adding limiting conditions. These vary from one database to the next, but common options include filtering results by date, language and publication type.
Thus, if required, you could search for articles about ‘puppies AND kittens’ and use these options to limit results to only case studies published in English during the last ten years. You could also search for things that aren’t puppies or kittens, but that would be much less cute.
