Search Skills

• Search engines like it best when you use keywords or phrases (rather than sentences) when searching. Break down your topic or question into a few 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.) as 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 

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”  

• The ‘AND’ connector: 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.   
  e.g. revolution AND democracy - finds sources which use both of these words. It would not find sources that talk about only ‘revolution’ or only ‘democracy’   

• 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:   

• The 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. 

• The ‘OR’ connector: Use a capitalised ‘OR’ to tell the search engine to search for either of these words.  
  E.g. (revolution OR uprising) will search for sources containing either of these words.  

• The 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.  
  E.g. a search for ‘wom?n’ will search for both ‘woman’ and ‘women’ 
  a search for ‘anti?social’ will find ‘anti-social’ and ‘antisocial’  

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 drop-down in between the lines.   

• Use the ‘OR’ command between the words on each line to search for similar or related terms.   

• 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 I that line in the title of a text. This is useful for refining your results.  

• You could add another line to add context to your search. For example, say 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. E.g. ‘UK OR “United Kingdom” OR Britain” 

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

Example advanced search 

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

Keywords: Gentrification, working class, London 

Remember: Building a search is a continuous process. 

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, and then adapt it and have another go. 

You can use filters refine your results further.   

Some useful filters are:  

• Date filter: What years you refine to is up to you and depends on your subject and topic, but this can be a useful way to refine your 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.  

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• 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 reviews:  

Note: When you make changes to your search words or run a new search your selected filters will refresh automatically. To "lock" your filters in for the duration of a search session hover over the applied filter and click on the padlock ‘Remember all filters’ button.