Once you've determined what types of sources you need for your assignment, you can start to search for your sources. Following are some tips and tricks for broadening and narrowing your search that you can use while searching.
In Google, you can type a question in the same way you might ask it in a conversation, for example:
What are the health benefits of regular exercise?
This is called natural language searching.
However, you are better off to search by identifying the main concepts in your research question. The reason for this is if you type in the entire research question into the search bar, the search engine will get confused and will try and match to all of the words that you type in even if these words aren’t really relevant to your research question (e.g. what, are, the).
A concept may be represented by a word or phrase, which is called a keyword. In our example question above the keywords that represent the key concepts are 1) health benefits and 2) regular exercise.
Generally, the fewer concepts that you use while searching the broader your search will be and you will retrieve more results. It's always better to start your search with only a couple of key concepts (usually 2-3 max). After all, there is nothing worse than getting no results when you do a search!
One way that you can quickly broaden your search to get more results is by brainstorming synonyms or related terms for each concept. The keywords that you use in your search will have a direct impact on the results that you find. There are many different ways of describing the same topic as people use different words to express the same ideas. It is up to you to select keywords that will help you find the most relevant information.
For example, some synonyms for exercise include fitness or physical activity.
You also might want to consider including alternative spellings and hyphenated words in your search.
For example, pediatrics can also be spelled as paediatrics.
For example, eLearning can be written with or without the hyphen (e-learning).
Another way to broaden your search is to remove any unnecessary keywords.
For example, you can remove the keyword "regular" in "regular exercise" if you don't find enough results. Many people actually mean "regular exercise" when they just say "exercise."
Finally, the more places you search, the more results you will get. Search individual databases that are relevant to your topic in addition to Omni Search, and you'll find more results related to your topic.
For example, try searching in the EBSCO Medline database as well as Omni Search when looking for resources on the health benefits of regular exercise.
The video below highlights some ways that you can brainstorm keywords and synonyms for each of your search concepts.
"Choosing Keywords and Brainstorming Synonyms" by Conestoga College Library is licensed under CC BY 4.0
Choosing Keywords and Brainstorming Synonyms - Transcript
Sometimes your search returns too many results and it's difficult to browse through the result list. In these cases, you can use the following strategies for narrowing your search results.
One way to narrow your search is to think about whether or not you want to focus on a particular aspects of your topic. For example, you may be looking for information on the health benefits of regular exercise in the beginning of your research. If you use "health" and "physical exercise" as keywords to search library resources, you will find many results. If you wish to focus on the benefit of regular exercise on heart health, you can add more keywords, "heart" or "cardiac" or "cardiovascular," and then you'll find fewer, more relevant results.
In Omni Search, as well as in many library database searches, there are many filters available for you to limit your search results to exactly what you need. For example, you can use the filters on the left side of the Omni search results screen to limit by resource type, availability, and publication date. You can also limit to peer reviewed journals.
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