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Library research is best approached with a good strategy. To find the information you
need, take the time to develop a search strategy before jumping into a database, which is an
online collection of information including articles, books and media, that you can search
to find information related to your topic.
You can use these strategies in any database such as the VCU Libraries Search, Academic
Search Complete, or JSTOR. Creating a good plan will help you conduct your research more
efficiently.
Searching in library databases is different from searching Google. Google will usually
guess at what you need, by providing suggestions and correcting your spelling. But when using
library databases, you have to tell the database exactly what you want in a very specific way.
The goal of this video is to help you develop a good search strategy to find the best material
related to your research.
Start with your research question or topic. If you are still struggling to formulate
your research question or topic, refer to the research guide on how do I start my research.
My research question is: Is euthanasia an ethical practice? Once you have formulated
your research question or topic, identify the key concepts, or main ideas. These are
the concepts on which you really want to focus when conducting your research, and you will
use these to build your search.
My key concepts or main ideas are euthanasia and ethical. Once you have identified your
key concepts, you will use them as your initial keywords, or search terms in the databases.
If I tried doing a search using only the word
euthanasia, I would find material on a variety of topics related to euthanasia and insurance
claims, euthanasia and religious beliefs, and euthanasia and psychology. Trying to
pull out the ethical-specific material would be difficult if I only searched for euthanasia,
without the word ethical.
The same thing would happen if I just typed in ethical - I would find information related
to ethical considerations of euthanasia, but I would also find information about ethical
journalism, ethical politics, and ethical child care. We will take these words, and
connect them using “AND:” AND narrows down a search. I am not looking for information
only related to euthanasia, I am looking for information about ethical concerns surrounding
euthanasia.
So we take our key concepts, and connect them using AND. euthanasia AND ethical. This
becomes our first search strategy, and we can put this into a database. When using
AND, it must be in capital letters, so the database knows you are using it to combine
keywords.
Your first search will not always be the best search, and you may not even find anything
You want to create multiple strategies to use as you tackle the databases. Go back
to those main ideas, and identify alternative keywords for each of them. These will be
synonyms or words related to your key concepts. I’ll start with euthanasia. Other words
that might get me similar results would be euthanize, assisted suicide, and mercy killing.
Sometimes, the words that come to your mind are not always the words used in the scholarly
world. Think about medical, legal or scientific alternatives to your key concepts. Consider
how you can broaden or narrow that specific concept. If you are having trouble brainstorming
keywords, there are a variety of resources to help you. Ask a classmate or a friend
- sometimes two heads are better than one. Try Googling your topic or looking at the
Wikipedia page to see what kind of vocabulary is being used. You can also use a thesaurus
- try thesaurus.com.
Once you have brainstormed a few synonyms or related words, you can connect them using
OR. Like AND, OR connects words together, but instead of narrowing, it broadens. I
want to find information that uses the words euthanasia OR euthanize OR mercy killing OR
assisted suicide. I’ll take information that uses any one of these terms. Instead
of doing separate searches for each of these words, I can search for them all at once by
using OR. Like AND, OR must also be in all capital letters.
To make a search as effective as possible, use AND and OR together in the same search.
I can start with my search for ethical AND euthanasia, but I also want euthanize OR mercy
killing OR assisted suicide. I focus my search using AND, but cover all my bases by
using OR.
Another effective way to save time and expand your options is to use truncation. To truncate
something means to cut it short. We are going to truncate some of our words in order
to find alternative endings.
Let’s take my key concept ethical. I will truncate ethical after the c, and add an asterisk.
This will tell the database to search for words that start with ethic, and end in something
else. It will pull up not just ethic, but ethics, ethical, and ethically all at the
same time.
You can do this with most words, but be careful where you truncate each word. If I truncated
ethics after the h, I would still get ethics, ethic, etc., but I would also get words like
ethanol, ethnic, and ethnography, all of which are unrelated to my topic.
Creating a good search strategy will save you time and effort when starting your research.
Start with a good research question, and identify the key concepts. Use AND to connect
different concepts to focus and narrow your search. Use OR to broaden your options by
connecting words that are related to each other. Truncate some of your words to expand
your results a little more.
You can use these strategies simultaneously, or try different combinations to see what
works best for you. You might try starting off in the VCU Libraries Search. Watch our
videos on Searching in the VCU Libraries to get started. If you have questions about developing
your search strategy, or if you are having trouble finding information, visit us at library.vcu.edu/askus
to get help from a librarian.