Key search words may be called "search terms" or "key terms"
Start with your assignment question. For example:
Discuss the health issues related to the aging population in Australia?
One way to start is the BUG technique developed by Dr Geraldine Price, Southampton University
Cowen, M., Maier, Pat, & Price, Geraldine. (2009). Study skills for nursing and healthcare students. Harlow, UK: Pearson Education.
Box the action or instruction words - this will change how you will write your assignment; analyse needs a different approach to compare, and discuss is different again. Note: these define how you should write, do not use them as search terms.
Underline the key terms in the topic - these are the areas of the topic you must cover, and this will also be very helpful in defining the search terms you will use.
Glance back to see if there is anything you missed or that will limit or modify your approach. Look for any instructions which are not part of the assignment question itself.
So, your first approach might take the assignment question and result in
resulting in a search like this:
"health issues" AND "aging population" AND Australia
Firstly, beware of filler words, such as issues - for example, some authors may use health implications; instead.
I would recommend searching for just the word health instead of "health issues"
Secondly, beware of alternative spelling - some authors will use the spelling ageing with an e.
Watch out for US and UK variations e.g. organization and organisation
Thirdly, be aware of alternative terms that authors might use to describe the same concept or similar concepts.
The search above would not find an article that talks about "the effect of population aging on hospital loads and waiting lists in the Australian context" - this article might not even mention the word health, but might be a very good article to use for the topic. What's more, in many databases searching for Australia will not find Australian.
Watch out for regional variations e.g. "mobile phones" or "cell phones" (or "cellular phones").
Keeping with the health theme, different authors might use "bed sores", "pressure ulcers", or "decubitus ulcers" for the same thing.
Fourthly, use professional terms where possible when searching for professional or academic articles e.g. instead of statistics AND measles, use the terms used in the health discipline, incidence AND measles.
After considering these tips, you might want to try multiple searches, each of which may get different results, for example:
health AND "aging population" AND Australia
health AND "ageing population" AND Australia
health AND ageing AND population AND Australia
health AND "aging population" AND Australian
hospital AND "aging population" AND Australian
In some of the following steps, we'll look at techniques for making multiple searches into one combined search
In many search engines, you can use three special search words to make your searches specific and your results relevant.
These are called Boolean operators (because they were first used in formal logic by George Boole).
Take a resource that contains some journal articles that contain the word chocolate, some articles that contain the word health, and some articles that contain both words (and many articles that do not contain either word, but won't show up in our search results).
You can combine your search terms using Boolean operators to find only specific sets of articles.
This will find all articles that have both the word health AND the word chocolate in the same article.
All the articles in the results must mention both topics.
This will find all the articles that have the word health OR the word chocolate, or both, in the same article.
This is good for finding articles where authors have used different words or phrases to describe the concept in which you are interested, such as cocoa OR chocolate.
This will find all articles that have the word health but do not have the word chocolate.
This is good for excluding articles that include specific topics you do not want to find. e.g. fruit NOT apple will search for articles that use the word fruit, but If the article has the word apple, it will not be included in the results even if the article has the word fruit.
This Boolean operator is not used as much as AND or OR, because often you are seeking to find articles, not exclude them.
Your search describes the words you want to find in each and every article.
Sometime you will have a single-line search box and you have to type in AND or OR.
Sometimes you will have multiple search boxes and you choose AND or OR from a drop-down selection.
Many search engines hide a multi-line search under an Advanced link (do you agree it should be called advanced?).
Some databases will accept these Boolean operators in upper or lower case or mixed case: and AND anD And aNd
However, some databases will only accept them in upper case.
If you use lower case, these databases will search for the word and or will simply discard the word from the search.
Upper case always works, so please get into the habit of using them in upper case.
Watch the video below for an example of searching using Boolean operators
Click the Transcript button to see the transcript of the video above
This is George Boole, a British mathematician and one of the fathers of computer science.
Since we use computers to search for sources, it's helpful to utilise his Boolean operators, AND, OR, and NOT.
Let's explore how these operators can refine our searches into "A struggle for the ages: Coca-Cola versus Pepsi".
I could search a library database for Coca-Cola.
In this case, I got back eight thousand, six hundred and forty (8,640) results.
So any article that included the keyword "Coca-Cola" was returned in my search.
I could also search the database for Pepsi - now I get back four thousand and sixty (4,060) results.
So I only retrieve articles that included the keyword Pepsi.
If I search for both keywords, connecting them with the AND operator, I only return eight hundred and forty-six (846) results.
Where did all the other results go?
By connecting with AND I limited my hits to only the articles that included both keywords.
So any article with just one keyword was eliminated from my result list.
Conversely, if I connect both keywords with the OR operator, I return eleven thousand, eight hundred and fifty-four (11,854) results.
This is much more than my previous searches.
By connecting with OR, I expanded my hits to any article that included either keyword.
Some may just cover Coca-Cola, some may just cover Pepsi, and some may cover both.
Finally, I could connect both keywords with the NOT operator, and I return seven thousand, seven hundred and ninety-four (7,794) results.
This is eight hundred and forty-six fewer results then I got searching for Coca-Cola alone.
What's going on with those eight hundred and forty-six (846) articles?
They must also include the keyword Pepsi.
By using the NOT operator I removed the subset of Coca-Cola articles that also talked about Pepsi.
So help yourself find relevant results quickly, by remembering good old George, and connecting your keywords with the appropriate Boolean operators, AND, OR or NOT.
Reminder: To get the mutli-line search interface in some databases, select Advanced search ("advanced" doesn't mean more complicated, sometimes I think it should be called "specific search" rather than "advanced search").
