Research Guides: Research Guide for High School Students: Creating a Search

Searching Overview

The problem with searching is you don't know how many results you will get until you have conducted the search. The goal, therefore, is to create an effective search. An effective search will get you a large amount of relevant results and a low amount of irrelevant results. But doing this in one try can be tricky. The strategies below will help you troubleshoot your search to either broaden it (to get more results) or narrow it (to get more relevant results), allowing you to find what you need for your project.

*Always remember, although we want to try and get an effective search the first time, you can always go back and change it!*

I am going to use the following research topic as an example to walk through the steps

How has the bicycle impacted the autonomy of different populations throughout history?

Steps

You are going to pull key subjects, words or ideas from the question, these will be the concepts

For the above question concepts would be;

Bicycle
Populations
Autonomy

What are Keywords;

Words relating to the concepts, they can also be phrases
One concept does not have to equal a single word
Keywords can be:
- synonyms
- narrower or broader terms related to the concept
List as many as you can think of, you don't have to use them in your search if you find them irrelevant

Concept 1 Keywords

Bicycle, cycle, bike, penny farthing

Concept 2 Keywords

Demographic, demography, population, women, children, people of colour, people who identify as 2SLGBTQIA+

Concept 3 Keywords

autonomy, freedom, independence, self-sufficiency

Step 3 is to connect your keywords or sting them together to make a search statement

This is done using Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT and Boolean Modifiers such as quotes and parentheses

Boolean Operators

What does it do?

AND combines search terms, typically linking different concepts
Will narrow your search results
The results of the search will include all terms linked with AND

For Example

Search Statement: bicycles AND autonomy

Results: would include all the words in the statement so the results would be those that discuss both bicycles and autonomy

What does it do?

OR is typically used to connect similar words/synonyms
Will broaden your search results
Search results will contain any of the words or phrases

For Example

Search Statement: autonomy OR freedom
Results: Articles about autonomy, articles about freedom, and articles about autonomy and freedom will all be retrieved

What does it do?

NOT excludes the word proceeding it
Will narrow your results
None of your search results will contain the word placed after NOT

Be careful using NOT as you can easily exclude relevant results

For Example

Search Statement: Egypt NOT Greece
Results: Articles that have the word Egypt. Will not have articles that mention Greece. This includes articles that have both Egypt and Greece in them.

How They Work;

Quotes are generally used when searching with a phrase
They will typically help you narrow down your search
By putting the phrase in quotes instead of searching for each individual word the database will search for the words together

FOR EXAMPLE

Search: bicycles AND "human rights"

Number of Results: 65

COMPARED TO

Search: bicycles AND human rights

Number of Results: 1.728

How they work;

Using parentheses (brackets) will narrow your results
Anything you put in parentheses is read first (yes, just like math) by the database
So the database will find articles that have the words in brackets first and then search those results for words outside the brackets

FOR EXAMPLE

Search Statement: freedom AND (bicycles OR bikes)

Number of Results: 657

COMPARED TO

Search Statement: freedom AND bicycles OR bikes

Number of Results: 106,175