Feel free to download the file below to help you brainstorm keywords and phrases, as well as keep track of your research process.
There are 6 key steps you'll use throughout the research and writing process:
Depending on the nature of your course, you may be assigned a topic, or have the freedom to pick your own. In either case, you'll need to be able to explore the topic by learning more about it, and then develop one or more research questions from what you've learned.
For example, one of the topics you read about in your Human Anatomy class is the shortage of doctors, and you're interested in learning more. In this scenario your topic is: doctor shortages
From there, you need to further develop your topic, narrow it down, and develop it into an actual question that can be answered through research. For example:
Depending on your interests, your topic is shaped into a research question. For example:
After you've done some initial reading on your topic and defined a research question, it's time to start looking for research articles. The first step of this process is to brainstorm keywords you'll use when searching databases.
Keywords and Key Phrases are what you'll use to help you find sources that help answer your topic/research question. Before you begin searching it is helpful to identify some of these key terms using the brainstorming process, including any similar/related words that come to mind. These are typically nouns and verbs, and are what you'll use in databases and other search engines to find relevant articles. It's helpful to write these words down, and add to them as you read literature. For example:
Topic: college students and libraries
Question: How do college freshmen perceive their academic library?
| College freshmen | Perceive | Academic Library |
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When you start doing your searches, try swapping one alternative word at a time and see how what different results you get.
Additionally, reading articles can help you identify additional key words or phrases. Many databases will provide Subject Terms and Author-Supplied Keywords that you can add to your brainstorming list.
Operators are powerful tools that can help make searching for articles easier. Using them allows you to either broaden or narrow the results of your searching, as well as search multiple similar terms at the same time.
The most commonly used of these tools are the BOOLEAN operators: AND, OR, & NOT.
Other, very useful operators are quotation marks "" and parentheses ()
AND narrows the search results by telling the search engine that you only want results that contain all terms. Be careful because each AND will reduce the number of results.
Ex: puppy AND kitten
OR is inclusive will return all results that match any of the terms you provide. Each OR will increase the number of results.
Ex: puppy OR kitten
NOT is an exclusive and will remove any articles that include the term after the NOT
Ex: puppy NOT kitten
You can combine multiple operators into the same search, especially when there are multiple terms you want included or excluded.
For example, if I'm interested in articles about social media, but I'm not interested in anything that covers Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, you could input your search as:
"Social Media" NOT Facebook NOT MySpace NOT LinkedIn
Any time you're searching for a key phrase (two or more words that are a single term) put them in quotation marks "". This tells any search engine to search for the words as a whole, rather than each individual word.
For example, searching for First Year Students in one database returns just over 14,000 results. This is because the database is giving you everything that matches at least one of the following: first, year, or students.
However, "First Year Students" in quotation marks returns 3,600 because you're telling the database that it needs to match all 3 words as a single phrase.
You can also use parentheses () to isolate a portion of your search that is using one or more Boolean operator, and have the database process it first. This advanced technique can be very helpful when using multiple OR statements to capture similar terms. If we wanted to combine all the key words and phrases from our previous sample topic, including similar terms, here is what one +search might look like:
Ex: (freshmen OR "first year students" OR "university freshmen") AND (libraries)
This is essentially telling Google or any database to perform the following 3 searches simultaneously, and give us the combined results:
When done correctly, this technique is more efficient than doing each search individually.
Without the parentheses, the search statement is processed in left-to-right order, meaning your results will include irrelevant results, In this example, the database interprets your search request to return anything that matches
Now you're getting results for any and all articles that include either the word freshmen OR "first year students", in addition to the subset that matches "university freshmen" AND libraries. The difference in results is roughly 400 v. 10,000 matches.
There are many filters you can use to refine your search results, but here are some of the most common and useful.
This filter can be set both before you search, and after. Peer-reviewed items are those that have been evaluated for scholarship and quality before being published in a journal or online resource.Your professors will likely require that articles you find during your research have been peer-reviewed.
Depending on the nature of your research assignment, your professor may require you to obtain ONLY recently published materials (e.g., within the last 5 years). If you have a lot of results, restricting to the last 5, 10 or 20 years can be helpful in limiting results.
Useful when you want to limit article results by a specific language. This can be very helpful when you are dealing with a large number of results.
Even sources that are listed as peer-reviewed in a database should be evaluated for both credibility and relevancy to your topic and question(s). Regardless of whether you found your source in a research database, or common magazine, here are some things you should be considering when reviewing your sources for inclusion:
See the videos below for additional information on how to evaluate your sources.
Once you've determined that the article or resource is fit to include in your paper, remember to add it to your citation list!