Research Survival Guide: Scholarly Research - Search Strategies

Before conducting your searches in library databases, come up with a search strategy that will help you find information.

• Choose your topic and turn that topic into a question.
  • Determine what you want to know about your topic.
• Come up with keywords that will help you search for articles.
  • Keywords are significant words/phrases that describe your topic.
  • Can be found in the title, abstract, author, text, etc. of the articles.
  • Watch this video from Winona State University to learn how to select and use keywords.
• Select a database and type in your keywords into the separate search boxes.
  • Too many results? Add other keywords to narrow down the results.
  • Too few results? Remove a keyword or add synonyms of your keywords to expand the results.
• Use subject headings in the databases to narrow down your search.
  • Subject headings are descriptive words assigned to an article by catalogers/indexers.
  • Items with similar themes or about similar subjects can be found under the database’s subject headings.
  • Watch this video from the Utah State University Libraries to learn more about the differences between searching with subject headings vs. keywords.