Hi, I’m Professor Heather Howard with the Parrish Library of Management and Economics.
This is a tutorial on how to create a search strategy to make your searching more efficient and help you retrieve better search results.
The three types of search strategies I’m going to cover include shotgun, snowball, and building blocks.
Shotgun is likely what you are most familiar with, as this is what we tend to use in a basic Google search.
Pick a list of important keywords,
throw them into the search engine, and see what you get back.
If it isn’t what you want, change out some words and try again.
This can be great for basic information, like the best place to get lunch in West Lafayette,
but is not where you want to stop if you are doing research.
While you are looking through the results of a shotgun search, try and find which related terms, words, or subjects
are being used in the sources that come up, and watch for sources that exactly fit what you are looking for.
You’ll use these later in the
snowball and building blocks methods.
The snowball method works by taking one book or article and working forwards and backwards
in time from that piece of literature to find more sources on the same topic.
Say you find the perfect article for your
research after doing some shotgun searching.
How do we take this article and use it to find more sources?
The first thing you can do is look within the article itself.
If it is exactly what you are looking for, it’s likely the article references
other sources that will be useful for your research.
Read through the list of reference and see if any looks promising!
The next thing we can do is search Google Scholar for the article to see if any new research has been done that cites the article.
In this case, there is one citation. When I click on Cited by 1, it will pull up that source, which looks to be related to whatever monkey
business I’m researching.
Here’s a hot tip – in the settings of Google Scholar, add a link to any libraries you are
affiliated with and it will tell you in the results if you have access to the full text through your library!
The final way to create a search strategy is with the building blocks method.
Using this, we take more time and care in creating our search string to pull back the best results possible.
Here’s how we do this.
First, identify key concepts in your research question.
In this example, “How does information literacy instruction impact student success”, information literacy, instruction, and student success are the
key concepts.
In, “What are best practices for the hiring and retention of service employees”, the key concepts are best practices, hiring and
retention, and service employees.
You get the idea!
From these key concepts, we now want to compile a list of alternative terms.
This can be synonyms, alternative spellings (I’m looking at you, British u),
plurals and alternative endings, and acronyms and abbreviations.
Also be sure to keep in mind alternative meanings for words on your list.
Here’s an example using the first research question from our list.
Alternative terms for Information Literacy might include the
abbreviation IL, media literacy, information evaluation, or information use.
Alternative terms for instruction might include class,
teaching, learning, or education.
Alternative terms for success might include performance, engagement, grades, GPA, or retention.
And finally, alternative terms for students might include undergraduates, undergrad, learners, or graduate.
For any of these terms, I certainly
could have created longer lists, which would have increased the results of my searches.
An additional thing that will improve your
search results is the use of phrasing and truncation.
For any terms that go together in a phrase, such as information literacy, put them in quotation marks.
This will keep the database from looking for everything with the word information and everything with the word
literacy, and instead bring back results where they are exactly as you have them in the quotation.
Truncation can help save you time thinking out every form of a word for your search.
Most databases recognize the asterisk as a wildcard – so if we do teach*, it will bring
back results with the word teach and with teach + anything else on the end of the word, such as teaches, teaching, or teacher.
This is a great way to make sure plurals are included in your results as well.
Now that we’ve done all this work, we put it all
together to create….
MEGA SEARCH!!
Unlike Google, library databases don’t run on a fancy algorithm.
They search via old school coding, so it helps to think of that when we are creating these search strings.
We aren’t writing for humans; we are writing for computers.
To this end, we build our search like an equation.
First, we create a parenthesis and
add in our list of information literacy terms separated by OR.
Notice the quotation marks I’ve put around the words I want it to find together.
Next, we add AND, then the terms for instruction, and so on.
Once these are all typed out, I can put them into one large search string.
You can copy and paste this directly into the library databases for your searches.
The ANDs and ORs I’ve been using are part of that computer language I mentioned.
These operators tell the
database to retrieve either more or less information, depending on which you use.
Remember earlier when I mentioned keeping in
mind those terms with alternate meanings?
There’s an operator to help with that, too.
Say I’m doing research on this cute pal.
I type the keyword Pitbull into my search and get back some relative results,
but I also find I’m getting a lot of results with this guy, too.
I can use the operator NOT to exclude results that refer to the musician to help make my results as relevant as possible.
One last trick when creating a search strategy is to use limiters in the databases.
Almost every database will have something like this that will
let you limit your results by publication type, date, language, and more.
Use these tools to refine your results and save yourself time.
Now you know how to create a search strategy for your research.
Remember, if you get stuck in your research and can’t find what you need,
visit the Library’s website and reach out via our Ask a Librarian service.
Thank you and good luck with your searching!