Finding the best resources for a research paper or project doesn't happen without some effort. Creating a search strategy is a key component for retrieving relevant search results.
Basic Steps to Formulating a Search Strategy:
- Define what the articles/materials need to be about.
- Break your topic into concepts.
- List all of the relevant keywords.
- Identify similar or related keywords/keyword phrases.
- Organize your search.
- Establish relationships between concepts using search operators (and, or, not).
- Choose databases and search engines appropriate for your topic.
- Library databases can be either general, such as Academic Search Complete, or specific, such as Military and Government Collection.
- Most search engines are not subject specific, and are designed for broad searches of the open web.
- Evaluate your results and refine your search to retrieve additional relevant resources.
