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Library Research: Your Search Strategy

1. Before beginning your research, try to come up with a topic:

 

 
 
 
 
 

2. When you come up with a topic (ex. "gender" "communication"), try to then narrow down the topic. (example: "gender stereotyping" or "gender differences in communication")

 

 
 
 
 
 

3. Sometimes you may need to be more specific.   (ex. communication in any relationships or marriage relationships?  work relationships?)

 

 
 
 
 
 
 

4. Come up with a research question (state it in a sentence).   (Example: Do men and women communicate differently?)

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

5. To search your topic effectively, come up with search terms. You will need to use these search terms to search a database effectively (example: gender, sex roles, gender stereotyping, relationships. workplace, communication)

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

6. Come up with related terms to your topic. They can be synonyms, broader/narrower terms. Terms somehow related to your subject. (Examples: sex role, sex differences, stereotype, interpersonal relations, work environment, marriage)

Searching Books and Articles:

Now, you are ready to phrase a search statement. You must phrase it so a database will know whether you want all your search terms, either one or the other, or to eliminate instances where a particular word or phrase exists:
 

communication AND sex differences	Database searches for instances where communication AND sex differences appear
gender role OR sex role	Database searches for instances where EITHER the phrases gender role OR sex role appear. Both CAN appear or just one of them.
women employment NOT harassment	Database finds all instances where women employment appears but ONLY WHEN the word harassment does not (say you received a large quantity of articles on sexual harassment and wanted to see other topics)

Notice that the search statements depend on an OPERATOR to basically give the database a command as to how it should perform its search based on the terms entered: (AND, OR, NOT). This is pertinent.

Once you have come up with a SEARCH STATEMENT, you are now ready to perform searches on the Library Catalog, our periodicals databases, and our other databases.
 

Searching the World Wide Web
 

When using search engines to search the World Wide Web, search statements you enter are slightly different. Take notice:
 

+communication +"sex differences" +"sex role" +"work environment" +communication	A "plus" sign is used to tell the database that the words MUST appear within the web pages you are searching.
+"women employment" -harassment	A "minus" sign is used to tell the database that the phrase women employment MUST appear but ONLY WHEN harassment does not.
"sex differences"  "work environment"  "gender stereotyping in the work environment"	In most search engines, you MUST surround your phrase with quotation marks. Most search engines treat each word separately. If there were no quotes, the search engine will likely find pages that EITHER have the words sex OR differences And anywhere these words appear on a web page, meaning a lot of non-relevant results!