Guide: Develop a Search Strategy
Searching
When you understand the requirements of your assignment, you can begin to plan how to look for the information you need.
A search strategy is a plan for how to look for information.
You will need to:
- Highlight the main concepts or keywords within your assignment question.
- Identify any synonyms or alternative ways to express the concepts.
- Combine the concepts
Example
How will climate change impact on agriculture in developing countries?
Keywords |
Related terms/synonyms |
| climate change |
|
| agriculture |
|
| developing countries |
|
The following are examples of searches that could be performed to find information for this topic:
- climate change and agriculture and developing countries
- global warming and farming and third world
- greenhouse effect and rural and pacific
To find out more about effectively combining keywords for searching, see the tutorial Skills for Effective Database Searching.
By taking some time to brainstorm your topic, you will have a range of terms to try when searching for information. If you only search on one term you might miss records that use different terms.
