When conducting research, use keywords in your searches. Don't type whole sentences in the search bar - the databases don't like that!
Start by taking keywords from your research question or thesis statement.
Example question: Has social media contributed to an increase of depression and anxiety in teenagers?
Feel free to make the topic a little more specific by adding a location: Has social media contributed to an increase of depression and anxiety in teenagers in the United States?
Possible keywords:
*Use synonyms and related concepts to expand your search. Use the Boolean operator OR in your search string to add synonyms.
You may not get relevant sources on your first search, and that is okay. Play around with your keywords, and conduct multiple searches.
Use these tips and tricks while searching if you want some flexibility, or if you want to be very precise.
Broaden your search by using truncation to include variations of a word that share the same stem. Truncation symbols vary by database, but it's usually an asterisk (*).
Example: searching for communis* will search for the following keywords: communism, communist, communists.
Wildcards allow you to search for words with variations in their spelling. Wildcard symbols vary by database, but are often a question mark (?).
Example: searching for wom?n will retrieve results for woman and women.
To search for a phrase, put it in quotations marks (""). This tells the database you want results with the exact phrase (where the words are in a specific order), not results that contain the individual words (because the words may not even be in the same paragraph).
Example: "social media"
When searching, you may have to experiment with different strategies. Boolean Operators help you save time and improve your search results.
Most databases automatically give you the option to select Boolean Operators on the search screen, so all you have to do is select the correct one from the drop-down menu that appears between search bars. You can also type in Boolean operators directly in your search strings if you want to get fancy with it.
Let's use the research question Has social media contributed to an increase of depression and anxiety in teenagers? to demonstrate how to use Boolean Operators.
Use AND when your research topic has more than one keyword that you must search for. In this example, the keywords we want to search for are "social media," "depression," and "teenagers."
social media AND depression AND teenagers
Use OR to broaden your search to include synonyms. Authors may use terms interchangeably, so you want to cover your bases and ensure you're getting search results that may use a different term for the same concept. Using OR will ask the database to give you any result that has at least one of your search terms.
depression OR "mental health" OR anxiety OR stress
Use NOT to exclude concepts closely related to your topic that you're not interested in. For example, you're researching how social media negatively impacts teenagers, but you don't want information about YouTube
"social media" NOT YouTube
You can incorporate them all together, for a search that looks like this:
