Research Skills

Refining your Search Strategy

Once your preliminary searching has been done using your keywords, you may find that you need to refine your search to find more relevant material.

If you have not found enough information you need to broaden your search, try the following techniques:

• Try alternative keywords, synonyms or even related words
• Try different combinations of your keywords
• Check bibliographies or footnotes in articles and books for alternative keywords and additional sources

If you have found too much information you will need to narrow your search, try the following techniques:

• Try limiting your search - by date, region, language, publication type, or country of publication
• Check encyclopaedias and find a more specific aspect of your topic to research
• Seek assistance from your tutor or a librarian

There are also three main strategies that you can employ to modify your search:

1. Boolean Searching

   The Boolean operator AND, OR, NOT provide a way of combining your keywords to refine your searches.

   AND - Use AND to narrow your search if you get too many references. Only documents with all your keywords will be found, the more keywords you combine with AND the fewer articles you will retrieve

   OR - If you don't get enough references widen your search by using OR. Documents will be found that contain at least one of your keywords. The more terms you combine with OR the more articles you will retrieve. Use OR to combine synonyms or alternative spellings of your keywords.

   NOT - If you want to make sure that you get information on one topic but not another exclude terms from your search by using NOT. You will only retrieve documents that contain the first keyword.

2. Wildcard Searching

   This technique makes use of wildcard characters such as $ ? *. In effect the character means, replace me. If you know a keyword has alternative spellings you may wish to try this technique.

3. Truncation

   This will help you to broaden your search by finding variations of the same word. Similar to wildcard searching, use characters such as $ ? * at the end of a word stem to include all various endings.

Try these guides for further advice on research skills.

• University of Leicester: Information Retrieval Skills Tutorial for Distance Learners
• OASIS: Online Advancement of Student Information Skills
• Open University: Safari - Skills in Accessing, Finding, and Reviewing Information