ENG101: College Writing (Spremulli)

Searching is a skill that takes time to build. This page offers tips and suggestions to build your research skills!

Keyword searching can be challenging at first.

When creating your keywords, you need to identify the search terms that the database uses to identify your topic. You need to turn your topic into search terms by being as specific as you can be. For example, if your research topic is about student performance in online learning classes, your search keywords would be: online learning AND performance, but not the rest of the sentence because relationship words and judgment words are not productive search terms. The goal is to be as specific as possible!

If you are struggling with a search, try synonyms and antonyms for your topic because synonyms and antonyms may match the terms used in the database. Sometimes searching requires trial-and-error searches of keywords before the best results are retrieved!

Boolean search operators connect keywords in a search to narrow down or broaden the search. 

Some examples:

• AND - the operator AND finds results with all of the connected keywords.
• OR - the operator OR finds results with either of the connected keywords.
• NOT - the operator NOT finds results that exclude the search words.

Databases have advanced search options and search refiners to optimize searches. 

Searches can be refined for a variety of reasons. For example, advanced search options can limit a search to only academic journals or only peer-reviewed journals. To locate recent and current sources, the search refiners can limit to searches by publication date. 

The subject thesaurus search tool is helpful for finding related search terms. Additionally, the subject thesaurus search can be useful for finding topics within your search subject to narrow down your search. This is especially helpful when your search is broad and you are looking for ways to narrow it down.