Strategic Searching
When compiling sources for a literature review, you will want to be strategic in order to locate the most important and relevant theories, concepts and information on your topic. Using the strategies on this page can improve your search results.
- Keyword selection
- Boolean searching, Truncation/*wildcards & Limiters
- Using QuickSearch
- Citation Mining
Search Strategies
Before you start searching, you should reflect on your research question to identify the most relevant terms to search for. These keywords that you select can greatly impact what sources you find within the databases or on the Internet.
You may want to start a chart like the one below as you develop your keywords. Each column coincides with a main idea for your research question.
Boolean operators can help your searching by expanding or limiting the results. The term is just a another way of describing using AND, OR, and NOT in your searches.
- In order to use these keyword connectors, you will need to understand the potential relationships between your search terms. Let’s take a look at some examples.
- Using AND will bring together results for all of the terms together, therefore limiting the amount of search results because they must contain all keywords.
- Using OR will increase your results by looking for all of your keywords and combining the results.
- Using NOT will remove results with those specific keywords from your results.
By using an asterisk symbol (*) you can expand your results by increasing the number of spellings of a word that could be acceptable in the search. For example, in the image on the right, instead of only searching for the word "extremism", using the * symbol, the results will include words such as extremism, extremist, extreme and extremists and increase the number of search results.
This may work better with some words more than others. Using this technique with "social media" would not have the same impact.
Many of the databases in the library include limiters which allow you to focus your search further than keywords or Boolean operators.
With limiters, you can:
- Limit results to full text
- Limit results to source types such as scholarly journals or news articles
- Limit to a specific publication date range
- Limit to peer-reviewed articles
- And more, depending on the database
However, too many limiters can do just that – overly limit your results. Consider using basic limiters first such as date. Then review the results and use limiters for strategic searches.
As you read through the sources you find, you'll need to organize the results that are most relevant to your topic.
Strategies for organizing your results:
- The search chart below can be a helpful way to organize your results
- You are not just summarizing but comparing and contrasting ideas from across sources
- For example, two authors might agree on a problem but their research finds different causes. You may want to comment on that gap in the literature in your review.
Below is a link to access a downloadable copy of the search chart:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1s-Gslj5HBwHsV0j9g5iMVmd8Rt-9AknyWbz5jcPrmOs/copy
QuickSearch
Using QuickSearch for Research
The Pace Library’s QuickSearch engine can also be a valuable tool for your research. It's a great place to get ideas of what "is out there" on your topic. You can do a general search and see if your ideas are discussed in publications.
Key Points:
- Using QuickSearch allows you to search across many Pace resources at one time.
- Search results can include books, news/magazine articles and scholarly sources.
- Using the limiters can narrow down your searches to only sources types that you want to find. For example, for this assignment, you may want to limit to only News or Magazine articles.
Google Scholar
Think of Google Scholar as another research database to have in your research toolbox. Google Scholar is a great place to search and see what's out there on a topic. You can search using keywords, then browse your results and look at the articles and abstracts you find to get other ideas for keywords you can then use in library databases.
Set your Google Scholar Preferences to recognize that you are affiliated with Pace University and to access full-text articles provided by the Pace Library. Check out our Help Guide which explains this process in full.
- Go to Google Scholar, and select the “Settings” link.
- On the “Settings” page, go to the Library Links area
- In the search box, type “Pace University” and then click the check boxes to add Pace Library options to your list of libraries