LibGuides: Search Skills: Building Searches

Mastering the art of searching will ensure you can find the most relevant and reliable information. In this section, we'll provide essential tips on creating and refining your searches to enhance your research.

Identify your search terms (Keywords)

Search engines like it best when you use keywords or phrases (rather than sentences).

When searching:

Break down your topic or question into keywords.

For example:

If your topic was: "Discuss the prevalence of cheating in exams at University". Your keywords would be: ‘cheating’ ‘exams’, and ‘university’.

Don’t include any words which don’t hold much meaning (e.g. ‘and’ ‘the’ ‘of’ etc.). These can pollute your results.
Consider synonyms and related terms: Search engines only search the exact words you input so it’s important to search for alternative keywords, as some author’s will refer to the concepts you’re interested in differently.

For example:

searching "assessment" as well as exams
searching "colleges" as well as universities
searching "plagiarism" as well as cheating

Refine your Results (Search Commands)

You can use the search commands below to refine your results. These can be used with most search engines and research databases.

There are essentially two ways to refine your results. You can narrow your search to make your results more specific or broaden your search to make your results more comprehensive.  

Narrow your search using these techniques: 

Phrase search	Use quotation marks to search for multiple words together as a phrase. e.g. “climate change”
AND	Use a capitalised ‘AND’ in between words to tell the search engine to look for sources that contain both of these words, not just one of them. For example, 'revolution AND democracy' finds sources which use both of these words. It would not find sources that talk about only ‘revolution’ or only ‘democracy’

Remember:

The ‘AND’ is built-in for most research databases – so if you add space between your keywords, the search engine automatically adds ‘AND’ in between the words. The more keywords you add, the less results you will get.

Broaden your search using these techniques:

Truncation operator (the asterisk)	Use an asterisk to search for different endings of a word. e.g.  decoloni* will find decolonial, decolonise, decolonised decolonising, deconolisation.
OR	Use a capitalised ‘OR’ to tell the search engine to search for either of these words. For example, 'revolution OR uprising' will search for sources containing either of these words.
Wildcard operator (question mark)	Use a question mark to search for words that can be spelled differently. The search engine will look for any character in the space where you placed the question mark. For example, a search for ‘wom?n’ will search for both ‘woman’ and ‘women’ a search for ‘anti?social’ will find ‘anti-social’ and ‘antisocial’.

Boolean Logic example:

Advanced Searches

Using the Advanced Search in Library Search, or the multi-line search function on other databases, makes doing more complex searches easier. We can use multiple search lines to combine search techniques (OR, asterisk, phrase searching) and incorporate alternative keywords.

When using advanced search:

Use one line for each different key idea in your research question
Make sure AND is in the the drop-down in between the lines.
Use the OR command between the words on each line to search for similar or related terms.
If needed, add another line to add context to your search. For example, if you wanted to focus on research from the UK, you could add another line with UK as the key concept and other relevant terms connected with OR. For example, 'UK OR “United Kingdom” OR Britain'.

Tip:

Advanced search also allows us to specify where we’d like to see certain keywords in the text. Rather than searching in ‘any field’ you can change the drop-down on the left to ‘Title and chapters’ to tell the search to only look for the terms in that line in the title of a text. This is useful for refining your results.

Try experimenting with different keywords, search commands and searching in different fields (parts of the text) to get different results.

Creating a search strategy

Topic: What impact has gentrification had on working class communities in London?

Keywords: Gentrification, working class, London

Alternative Terms include: urban renewal, inequality, "inner city"

Breakdown of question into concepts and linking with related terms:

Concept 1: Gentrification	gentrif* OR regeneration OR “urban renewal”
AND
Concept 2: Working Class	“working class” OR “social class” OR inequality OR “middle class”
AND
Concept 3: London	london OR “inner city” OR inner-city

How this applies to an advanced search:

Remember:

Building an effective search is a continuous process. Creating a good search strategy takes time, research and experimentation. It's unlikely that you'll get the results you're looking for straight away. You'll need to try out a search, assess the relevance of the results and then adapt it and have another go.

Filtering your results

You can use filters to refine your results further.  

Some useful filters are: 

Date filter: The date range you refine will depend on your subject and topic, but this can be a useful way to exclude irrelevant results.

Subject filter: Limit your results to a particular subject, or exclude results related to specific subjects. In library search, use the green tick boxes to include results only related to these subjects.  Use the red cross (to the right of the word) to exclude subjects you don’t want to see.

Include Subject	Exclude Subject

Item type filter: Specify the types of items you’d like to search for e.g. Journal Articles, Books, Book Chapters, Dissertations, etc. You can also exclude types of items from your results using the red cross box option. For example, you could exclude magazine articles.

Include Item Type	Exclude Item Type

Note: 

When you make changes to your search words or run a new search, your selected filters will reset automatically. To "lock" your filters in for the duration of a search session, select the ‘Remember all filters’ button:

Advanced search skills

Watch the video below to see for a more in-depth overview of how to effectively go from a general topic to a more refined research question.

Video Transcript

Welcome to our tutorial on effective search strategies.
In this session, we'll cover how to identify keywords, utilise search commands, construct advanced searches, and refine your results using filters.

Example topic
For our tutorial we'll be researching the following topic: The impact of gentrification on the working class in London.
We'll be using the University of Sussex's library search in this video, but the techniques we cover will also work in other research databases.

Identifying keywords.
Regardless of your research topic, the first step is to identify your keywords. These are the building blocks of your search. In our example, the key concepts are gentrification, working class and London. Avoid including words that don't hold much meaning, like the 'and', 'of' and the 'the'. These can pollute your results. Include only keywords that will help you find what you're looking for. For example, I won't search for impact because, chances are, any sources including the terms gentrification, working class and London will naturally be discussing the impact of gentrification in some way.

Alternative keywords
The next step is to brainstorm some alternative keywords. Research databases are literal and only search for the exact words we input, so we need to consider the different ways researchers might refer to the concepts we're interested in. For instance, working class could also be referred to as low-income. We also want to consider terms which don't mean exactly the same thing, but are closely related, like social class and poverty. It's also helpful to think about how different viewpoints might affect the language being used. Gentrification might be referred to as social cleansing, urban renewal, or redevelopment, depending on the author's perspective.
Since I'm focusing on London, I won't use any alternative key terms for that concept. If I don't get enough results, I could try a broader term like UK, but I'll stick with just London for now.

Discovering different keywords
When you're new to a topic, you may not be familiar with the terms researchers use to discuss it. Check your reading list or start with a simple scoping search to find a few relevant sources and examine the language used in those texts.
What other terms do researchers use to discuss our topic? Let's try finding out with a scoping search. We'll just do a basic keyword search for gentrification, working class and London. This article looks relevant. We can now scan the title and abstract for any terms we haven't thought of. Some useful terms here are 'displacement', 'council housing' and 'housing estates', and 'accumulation by dispossession.'

We can also check this article's bibliography and citations to see if any of the referenced research is useful and discusses these topics in different ways. See our citation searching page for more information on this method of searching.

Now we have some new keywords to add to our search. Don't forget to keep a note of any new keywords you come across during your research.

Search commands
We found a few relevant articles with our scoping search, but we can improve our search to find more. There are essentially two ways to adapt our searches. We can narrow our search to make our results more specific or broaden our search to make our results more comprehensive.

Narrowing your search
Use these techniques to narrow your search and see more relevant results:

Phrase searching: Add quotation marks to search for multiple words together in that order. For example, if we search for a working class without quotation marks, we get nearly 324,000 results. This will return results about the working classes, but our results will also include articles talking about working and class separately. Like this article on class imbalance and working conditions. If we do the same search again, but place working class in double quote marks. There's no need to use double quotation marks when searching for single words, only when you have keywords you want to see together.

The AND connector: Use a capitalised and between words to tell the search engine to look for sources that contain both of these words, not just one of them. For example, if we search for gentrification and London, we'll get results which mention both of these keywords. We won't see results that only talk about gentrification or only talk about London.
The 'AND' is built into most research databases, including Library search. When you leave a space between words, the search engine will interpret that as an 'AND' command. The more keywords you add, the less results you get. So adding more keywords is the simplest way to narrow your results and make them more specific, but don't add too many or your search may not return any results.

Broadening your search

The truncation operator, also known as the asterisk: You can use an asterisk to search for different endings of a word. For example, we're interested in gentrification, but we also want to see results that mention variations of this term, like gentrify, gentrified, or gentrifying. Research databases don't usually search for these variations automatically. But if we search 'gentrif*' with an asterisk placed after the F, the search engine will look for any words with that beginning, so our results will include sources mentioning gentrification, but also gentrify, gentrified, gentrifying, etc.

The OR connector. This is the opposite of the AND connector. We can use a capitalised OR between keywords to tell the search engine to look for results which mention any of these words. For example, searching for poverty or low income will return results that mention only poverty, only low income or both words.

Advanced searching
Advanced searching makes doing more complex searches easier. You can use multiple search lines to combine these techniques, like the OR the asterisks, and phrase searching, and incorporate our alternative keywords.
To get to Advanced search in Library search, just click the Advanced search button next to the search bar.

When building an advanced search, we recommend using one line for each different key idea in your research question. We'll need three lines one for working class, one for gentrification and one for London. Now I'm going to think about how I can improve this search using search commands. I'll start by using quotation marks to phrase search working class and I'll use an asterisk to search for any words beginning with 'gentrif'.
Time to start adding in those alternative words for each of my concepts. I need to use the capital OR command between these words to search for results that mention any of these terms. Let's start with my gentrification line. Let's try 'gentrif' with the asterisk or social cleansing or urban renewal or displacement. I'm using double quote marks for social cleansing and urban renewal, because I want to see these words appear together as phrases. I'm also going to use an asterisk after the 'c' in displacement. This will search for variations of the term like displacing or displaced.
I'm not adding all the alternative keywords we brainstormed earlier just to keep this demo simple, but you can add as many as you like.
Now for my working-class line. My alternative keywords here are low-income, poverty and social housing. I'm going to phrase search social housing too.
I won't add any alternative keywords in my last London line, because I'm only interested in results specifically talking about this city.

It's important to make sure 'AND' is selected in the dropdown between your search lines. This tells the search engine to look for any results that contain at least one of the terms from each of your search lines. Let's try out this advanced search. I've got lots of results discussing gentrification and the working class, which is useful for context, but I want to see more sources that focus on London.
I can focus my search using the search field dropdown in advanced search. This allows us to specify where we'd like to see certain keywords in the text. Rather than searching in any field you can change the dropdown on the left to Title and chapters. This is useful for surfacing results that focus on one of your key concepts, in this case, London.
Let's give it a go. We've gone from over 1500 results to 286, but all of these sources will mention London in the title. Sometimes a book will look like it doesn't have the key word you've asked for in the title, but if you click into it, one of the chapters will have your keyword in the title. Suddenly my results are looking a lot more relevant. You can do this with as many of your search lines as you want. I like the look of my results, so I'm going to stop here for now.

Refining results with filters
There are lots of filters available in library search. Some of the most helpful filters are the item type filter, the creation date filter, and the subject filter.
We can use the item type filter to see only particular types of sources. I want to focus on scholarly journal articles, so I'm going to click the articles filter.
We can use the creation date filter to see only articles published within a certain time period. I'm looking for articles which were published in the last ten years, so I'm going to enter 2014 into the 'from' box and hit refine.
Lastly, there's the subject filter. Expanding this will show you a full list of the different topics your results relate to. You could tick one subject term to see only the results that are explicitly related to that topic, but this could exclude some results you do want to see. Instead, we recommend using this filter to exclude the topics you aren't interested in. For example, let's say I don't want to see any results that are related to the history of the gentrification in London. I've got eight results that are related to history. I'm going to use the Red cross option on the right. I'm going to use the Red cross option on the right of the subject term to exclude these results. This is particularly useful if your search is returning results from another discipline which you aren't interested in.
Now I have a very specific set of 68 journal articles which are really relevant to my research question.

An important thing to remember when using filters is that they will disappear if you edit your search and rerun it. To avoid having to apply your filters again you can lock them in place using this 'Remember all filters' button. Now I can edit my search, for example, by adding another keyword we came across earlier: Dispossession. When I run this search, my filters are still applied. And hey, we got three more results too!

Saving results
It takes time to create an effective search and find relevant results. We recommend signing into Library Search with your University of Sussex details. This allows you to pin results to your favourites so you don't lose them and to save your searches so you can easily rerun them later. For more information on saving and managing your results in library search, see the Managing Results page of our Search Skills guide.

The Search Strategy Cycle
Creating a good search takes time and experimentation. It's unlikely that you'll get the results you're looking for straight away. You'll need to try out a search, assess the relevance of your results, save anything useful, and then adapt your search and have another go. Try out different keywords, search commands and filters to generate different results.

That's all for this tutorial. Happy searching!