Database Searching in 4 Steps: The Video
Is it really only 4 steps?
Pick a Database by answering these questions:
- Who do you want to hear from? Which disciplines would have done research in this area? Or, maybe you want to hear from folks working in a certain field? Perhaps librarians have something to say on that topic? Or oil & gas executives?
- What formats are you going for? Books? Scholarly articles? Streaming video? Newspaper articles?
- Do you need current information? Or, are you wanting to search historically?
Construct/Compose a logical beginning search by:
- Deciding on the simplest, clearest terms for each concept/idea inherent in your research topic
- Connecting the ideas with AND
- Separating synonyms with OR
- Truncating to pick up word variants
- Enclosing phrases in quotations
For example the search pictured below is looking for material on how Muslims are portrayed in popular media:
Revise your initial search by:
- Scrutinizing your search results looking for additional or better terms
- being especially attentive to the words appearing the Subject fields
- making logical use of the Boolean OR
- perhaps, limiting major concepts to the SUBJECT field search:
Efficiently sort through your results by:
- Collecting relevant citations using tools of the database
- Emailing yourself formatted citations
- Utilizing the Find-It-@-SCU link to locate additional fulltext