DEVELOPING A

SEARCH STRATEGY

Before starting to search using any electronic database, be it the library online catalogue (IPAC), indexes and abstracts or the Internet, it is important to spend some time thinking about your information needs. This is known as developing a "search strategy" and if done systematically it will significantly improve your chances of finding relevant information. 

Developing a Search Strategy for Finding the Information you

Need

Points to consider as you begin your research include these:

What do I need to know about this topic?

Does it involve researching people, places, events, or a particular time in history?

How current must my information be?

Do I need facts and statistics?

Do I need a general overview of my subject, or a lot of detail?

Do I need to find out both sides of an argument?

Is my topic controversial or still being explored? Will there be differing viewpoints in different sources?

Points to consider in determining your search strategy include these:

Reference sources, such as encyclopedias or almanacs, are a good starting place for an overview of your topic and for gathering facts and statistics.

If your topic requires you to get information from books, you would want to search the Library's Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC), to see if the library system has books that you can check out.

Do you need to find current information on your topic?

If your topic requires a broad overview of information, you may want to search an online encyclopedia. These encyclopedias are generally easy to use and can give you a large amount of information in a short period of time.

Keywords

 identified the kind of information you need, and developed a search strategy regarding the types of sources you will use, the next step is to select search terms or "keywords" from your topic to use to conduct your search. These keywords, which describe the topic you are researching, are the terms you will use when you search in any kind of electronic database, as well as on the World Wide Web.

Search operators, such as AND, OR and NOT, are terms that allow you to group your keywords together to retrieve a number of different types of results. Operators are words that may add or subtract a concept to your search.