The ability to conduct searches to locate relevant sources for a research paper is an acquired skill. It takes practice. Below are some search strategies that you can employ in your own research process. If your initial approach doesn't work, don't worry. Try a different combination of words and concepts until you get the results you want. Research is a process and sometimes it takes several attempts to get the search results you want.
The approach you take when entering your search terms in a library database will affect the results you get. Before building a search, think about how you want to combine your search terms.
Putting words in quotation marks - if you want a group of words to appear exactly as written, place the words in quotation marks. You might use quotation marks so those terms appear as a phrase and not isolated from one another. Example: "artificial intelligence"
Using AND to combine search terms - when you combine terms using AND, you will retrieve results in which these terms appear somewhere in the fields searched. Example: Artificial AND Intelligence - Artificial could appear in the first sentence of the abstract and Intelligence could appear in the subject fields.
Using OR to combine search terms - combining terms with OR will increase the number of results that you get. You would use OR when you have multiple terms that describe your topic. This will broaden your search results. Example: Artificial Intelligence OR Artificial Thinking
Using an asterisk (*) at the end of a word will bring back variations of the word.
Example:c orpor* will retrieve results with the words corporate, corporation, etc.
Warning: Be careful to not place the asterisk to early in the word because it may retrieve irrelevant results.
Example: cor* will retrieve corporate, corporation, but it will also retrieve results with words like cord, corpse, cork, etc. which are not likely on point.
Sometimes when searching a database you might enter terms that yield no results. If this happens, you might want to search the subject or thesaurus to ensure that the terms you are using are appropriate. The subject headings can also help you expand your search terms by suggesting, broader, narrower and related terms.
Example: In Business Source Complete, click on Thesaurus to identify potential search terms. In this example, the term information security was entered and the relevancy ranked radio button was selected. The results show that the database recommends the term Information Technology Security be used instead of Information Security. See image below for a visual example.
You can use one article in 3 different ways. First you can use the text within the article itself. Second, you can review the references at the end of the article to find additional articles on your topic. This will provide you with older research. Third, you can locate articles that have cited the article you have in hand. This will provide new research. To locate new articles, go to scholar.google.com. Enter the title of the article in the search box. Click on Cited By to see new research that have cited the original article. The image below provides a visual representation of the Research Article Trifecta.
