Search Strategy

When searching for academic resources, having a search strategy can save your time. Watch the video below to learn about using keywords and creating a search strategy for your research paper.

How to create a strong and effective research

Keywords

A search strategy operates around keywords. Keywords are 1 to 3 terms that represent your research topic. Places, people, time periods, concepts, and ideas are common types of keywords. Creating a list of keywords before searching in a library database will help in developing a successful search strategy.

A challenge when searching is that different authors will often describe a similar concept or idea using slightly different words. A strategy that can help is brainstorming synonyms or similar terms , or looking at index (subject) terms used by a database or a journal article. To find subject terms and keywords, look at examples below.

Tip 1: Look at Keywords within the Research Article.

Let's say you have been given an article to read about one class of chemical compounds that bind to the dopamine receptor D3 and thus block an uptake of dopamine. Note that a list of useful keywords is provided within the article. You can search for "keywords" or look at the beginning or end of an article, or in Footnotes.

Tip 2: Read an Abstract

What if keywords are not listed anywhere in the article?

In this case, scan the abstract to identify words that are used to describe the concept. As abstract is a highlight of the whole article, it uses a keywords-rich vocabulary that allows the reader to immediately assign the article to the specific sub-field. In the article below, the underlined words would be the keywords: antagonist, agonist modulators, substance abuse, acylaminobutylpiperazines, and selective D3R ligands.

Tip 3: Look at index terms that the database is using

Finally, search the database and take a look at index terms used by the database.

Even though we searched for "drug addiction", the database indexed it as "substance-related disorders," which suggests that it would be best to search for "substance-related disorder" or perhaps "substance disorder."

Narrowing the Search

Searching for a keyword may lead to thousands of results, especially when the keyword was defined broadly. It is often recommended to do a broader search and later refine your results further using filters. If you are a video person, checkout this short video teaching you some quick tips & shortcuts for Database Searching. All library databases will allow you to refine, narrow, or filter your results. There are two ways of narrowing search: change sorting and add filters.

Change Sorting

Those results are usually sorted out based on Relevance or Best Match (highest relevance on top). You can alternatively Sort by:

Publication year - the year when the paper was published;
Number of citations - the number of papers that list the selected paper in their bibliography;
Author name - the name of the first author;
Journal name - the name of the journal where the paper was published.

Add Filters

There are many types of filters you can apply. Common filters include:

Publication date - allows selecting recent publications or publications of a specific time period;
Source type - allows selecting a specific document type, for example:
- review articles - when one wants to get a general overview on the topic;
- journal articles - when one is looking for experimental details or a specific article;
- clinical studies - when one is looking for clinical studies;
Publication title - allows selecting a specific journal;
Language - allows selecting a publication language;
Subject or index terms - allows selecting a specific topic pre-defined by a database;
Text availability - allows selecting only those sources that have full text available.

Chemistry database additionally incorporate filters on:

Physical properties (melting point, density, viscosity, etc)
Spectra availability (NMR, IR, MS)
Substance reactivity
Chemical structure, etc.

Finding Books

Books are secondary sources of information and libraries have their own searchable databases to search for books. To demostrate how to find books in the library, we will use the University of Michigan Library Search. One shall use a book title or topic as a keyword and apply sorting and filters to refine the search results. You can view this short video to understand how to find books. We also summarized the steps mentioned in the video down below.

1. Search Your Topic