Once you have identified where you would like to look for your information needs, you can then search for the information you need. The concepts that you used to build your research question can also be used to develop a research statement. For example, suppose your research question is “How does a student’s religious orientation influence their well-being?”. The concepts covered in this research statement include students, religious orientation, and well-being. These are also the terms one can search for in a database.

To optimize your search strategy with key terms, use the concepts or phrases in your research sentence. Try to think of possible synonyms for the concept terms. In addition, if the database has a thesaurus or a controlled vocabulary, you can search your concept words or phrases to determine which terms the databases use.

A controlled vocabulary is useful because, in cases where there are multiple terms used for a concept, a controlled vocabulary helps to identify which of the terms research on that concept is indexed under. A thesaurus helps to identify the controlled vocabulary by listing it for the concepts in a database.

Using Boolean Operators

In a search, you can look for terms as they relate to each other. This can be accomplished by using Boolean operators. The basic operational terms you can connect your concept terms are AND, OR, and NOT.

The Boolean operator AND is used when you want to narrow your results and include all the words in the phrase. It narrows down the terms because with AND it looks for results that only have all the terms together.

The Boolean operator OR, on the other hand, broadens a search. It is the search operator that you can use if you would like to look for both terms and their synonyms.

The term NOT is used to exclude results.

Multiple Boolean Operators

Multiple Boolean operators can be used together, but with different Boolean operators and three or more concepts you are searching for, it is best in this case to use parentheses. Parentheses with Boolean operators work like they do in math in that whatever is counted within parentheses is counted first, followed by whatever terms are there from left to right.

Variations in Spelling

If you want to search words with variations in spelling, you can search using truncation or wildcards. Truncation searches for variations in word endings; wildcards search for variations in spelling within a word.

While truncation and wildcard searches vary in notation by database, to search with truncation, drop off the end of the word and put an asterisk (*) in its place. A wildcard usually uses the question mark (?) and the number of letters you want to vary.

For example, suppose you would like to research children’s spirituality. A search you could use would be “child* AND spiritu*.”  In this search, child* would enable you to search for child, childhood, and children. Spiritu* would search for the words spiritual and spirituality. Also, in this case you would use the Boolean operator AND to search for both spirituality and children together.

Searching for Phrases

Suppose you want to search for a concept that requires more than one word, such as if you wanted to study death anxiety in cancer patients. To search for concepts with more than one word (i.e., phrases), include the phrase in quotation marks. In this case, therefore, you search for “death anxiety” and “cancer patients,” putting both phrases in quotation marks.

Quotation marks are important because they allow you to search for the words together. Without the quotation marks, the database search would present results with both death and anxiety in it, but not necessarily adjacent to each other.

Proceed to Filters, Sorting Results, and Saving Your Work

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