The Research Process

To dramatically increase the relevancy and usefulness of the information you find, you should conduct multiple searches using different search language. To this end, it is helpful to create a list of possible search terms. (Even an "s" on the end of a word may make a difference in your search results.)

• As you research, add to this list any words or phrases you commonly see.
• Use a thesaurus (for example, Thesaurus.com (opens in new window)) to find synonyms and other vocabulary. Wikipedia (opens in new window), too, can be helpful for discovering vocabulary on many topics.
• Mark each word or phrase on your list as a synonym, broader topic, narrower topic, or related topic.

When searching, avoid using articles (like a, an, the), connective words (like and, but, or, except as explained below), and other very common words. Try to use only nouns and verbs.

To illustrate how to construct a search string or query from your compiled vocabulary, let's take the example of finding information about working as a librarian at a college. Key concepts we can address with our search are: librarian, working, and college.

Use OR to connect synonyms and related terms:

librarianship OR libraries OR librarians

Use AND to combine these sets of related terms, each representing one concept:

librarianship OR libraries OR librarians
AND
career OR jobs OR profession
AND
college OR university OR "higher education"

Put double quotation marks around phrases like "higher education". This tells the search tool that you want to find those two words together, in that order. This is helpful strategy both for specific phrases (social media, civil war) and exact titles (the color purple, return of the king).

An asterisk can often be used to search for variations on a root word, like librari*.

In many databases' advanced search, you'll see several search boxes joined by "AND" so you can enter each group of terms linked by "OR" in its own box:

If you're using a single search box, you can place each group of terms inside parentheses:

librari* AND (career OR jobs OR profession) AND (college OR university OR "higher education")

When used this way, AND and OR are called "Boolean operators."

Does capitalization matter?

Keywords, even proper nouns, don't need to be capitalized. Whether you include capital letters or not will not affect your search results.

Capitalization of Boolean operators (AND, OR, and their rarer companion, NOT) might matter – some databases require you to enter these in uppercase (all caps) to make them function as described above. If you're not sure if the database you're using requires this, or if your search isn't behaving as expected, try changing lowercase operators to uppercase.