Database Searching Skills

Welcome

Welcome to the Search Strategies tutorial. This tutorial is designed to help anyone looking for information online to develop skills in defining a search strategy and conducting searches efficiently. It is suitable for policy makers and practitioners as well as academics and students. In fact, it is open to anyone handling information and evidence.

For the purposes of this tutorial we’ll see effective searching as a three-step process to be worked through sequentially. The tutorial will focus on finding reliable journal articles and examples will all be from sources which are openly accessible.

  1. Planning Your Search: This activity will introduce you to the importance of planning a search and help you to develop strategies for searching. While reading, please be thinking about a search that you would like to conduct. You will have an opportunity to put this into practice later in the tutorial. When starting to look for information, it can be tempting to sit down at a computer and simply start typing search terms into Google. While this trial-and-error approach may work in daily life for casual searching, good researchers take the time to think in advance and develop a search strategy.
  2. Search tools: This activity will help you acquire the concepts and vocabulary for effective searching. In Step 1, we worked on defining and describing our search and decided on a starting point. We also set up expectations for results, looking at Google Scholaras an example. Remember you always have the option to search a number of tools: Google Scholar is simply an accessible and efficient place to start.Now we’ll turn our attention to search refinements, which will help your searches to be targeted, effective and efficient. Most search tools offer a search box as well as these refinements:
    • Boolean logic
    • Truncation
    • Field searching
  3. Successful searching: This activity will allow you to try out your ideas and give you the results of all of your preparation. We are now ready to run the search! Go to a fresh Google Scholar screen. Using your Search Strategy Form as a guide, formulate the search you want to conduct. Decide if you want to type a string or use the Google Scholar Advanced search menu. It can be useful to type the string anyway to clarify your search terms.