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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. "procrastination"), try to then narrow down the topic. (example: "Why do students tend to procrastinate?" or "What works best for students to overcome procrastination?"):

3. Sometimes you may need to be more specific.   (Perhaps if there seems so much written about procrastination, you might want to identify college or undergraduate students, or discuss procrastination over papers)

4. Come up with a research question (state it in a sentence).   (Example: Do college students who procrastinate tend to get lower grades, and if so, what methods are best for them to overcome what may be a self-defeating behavior?)

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: procrastination, college students, grades, self-defeating behavior) 
    
   
   

6. Come up with related terms to your topic. They can be synonyms, antonyms, broader/narrower terms. Terms somehow related to your subject. (Examples: motivation, time management, avoidance, undergraduate students, university students)
   
   
   

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:
 

Procrastination AND college students	Database searches for instances where procrastination AND college students appear
College students OR university students	Database searches for instances where EITHER the words guns OR firearms appear. Both CAN appear or just one of them.
Depression NOT great	Database finds all instances where depression appears but ONLY WHEN the word great  does not (say all you kept getting was articles on the Great Depression of the 1930’s)

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.

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

+"college students" +grades +procrastination	A "plus" sign is used to tell the database that the words MUST appear within the web pages you are searching.
+Depression -great	A "minus" sign is used to tell the database that the word depression MUST appear but ONLY WHEN great does not.
"colleges students” “Self-defeating behavior” “techniques to overcome procrastination”	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 college OR students And anywhere these words appear on a web page, meaning a lot of non-relevant results!