Prof. Maroney - English 101 - Fall 2023: Search Strategy

It is very important to have a variety of keywords to search. This is because some terms will yield more results than others and/or results that are more relevant to your research paper topic. There is no one "correct" search word to use. Different keywords will give you more results:

• When searching the the catalog and databases for sources, do not type in whole sentences
• Look at your readings for ideas on topics. Write down possible search terms to use in the databases
• Think of synonyms, antonyms, and related terms
• You may need to broaden or narrow your search terms depending on your results
• Try your search terms in different combinations to get the greatest number of results
• Look at the suggested keywords when using the databases
• Go to Google and/or Google Scholar and look at suggested searches

We use filters because nobody has time to go through thousands upon thousands of results.

• Resource type
• Creation date
• Peer reviewed
• Language

Use AND to combine keywords and narrow your search results when searching the electronic databases for articles:

•  Self-driving cars AND safety 

If you don't use truncation, wildcards, and/or quotation marks, some databases will look for an exact match to the words you type, and you may miss some relevant materials.

Truncation (*):

child*

brings up: child, children, childhood, and any other word that starts with the root "child." This works in most of the databases.

Wildcards (? or !):

globali?ation

brings up items with the words globalization or globalisation.

Quotation marks ( " " ):

 "community college"

brings up only results that contain those exact words in that exact order, not results that contain only one of the terms