Select a topic that is interesting to you and one that meets your assignment requirements. You may revise your research question multiple times as you learn more about the subject. See this tutorial about developing a research topic. As an example, I might want to explore the topic of transracial adoption.
Once you have your topic, think about ways to broaden and narrow the main terms of your research question. The end result of this brainstorming activity should be a list of 3-5 words for each key concept of your research question.
Once you've brainstormed keywords for your research question, think about what operators you may use. Operators are a way of combining keywords to get the best results from your search.
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"QuotationMarks" |
Put quotes around phrases when you want that phrase to be found in that exact order Ex: "transracial adoption" |
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AND
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Use AND when you want to find articles or other information that contains both/all keywords Ex: self-esteem AND *racial adoption
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OR |
Use OR when you want to find articles or other information that contains at least one of the keywords Ex: "transracial adoption" OR "international adoption" |
To explore peer-reviewed articles on my topic of transracial adoption, I selected the "Social Sciences Full Text" database from the "Peer Reviewed Articles" tab on the first page of this guide, I then searched using the following:
There are a few types of resources that you may need to search outside of the library to find. For example, if you're looking for a website resource, you'll need to use Google or a similar search engine to find your resource and evaluate it's credibility. You can apply many of the search strategies we've learned when you're searching Google. Use the tips below to help bring back more relevant results:
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"quotations around a phrase" Ex: "transracial adoption" |
Just like when you're searching in library databases, by putting quotations around a phrase or multiple words, you're telling the search engine that you want to see those words in that order. This brings back fewer, but more relevant results. |
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site:URL Ex: site:hhs.gov "transracial adoption" |
Use a site search to use Google's search engine to search for content on a particular website. For example, by searching the fhsu.edu URL in addition to a keyword, I make sure that my results are related to FHSU instead of any other university. This strategy would also be helpful if you want to search the company's website for any information or statements they've released about the crisis, |
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.org or .edu or .gov Ex. site:.gov "transracial adoption" |
By specifying the suffix of the URL, Google responds with results that more closely match that type of website. |
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filetype:pdf Ex. "transracial adoption" filetype:pdf |
You can tell Google what type of file you're looking for in order to search for uploaded documents relating to your keyword search. The following file types might be helpful when:
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