STEP 1 - Choose Search Terms

How will you type your search query into a database search box? You'll need to identify the various concepts of your topic and choose search terms to describe them. 

Example topic: Concussion protocols for children
This topic, while broad, has multiple concepts that will need to be included in a database search:

• Concussion
• Protocol
• Children

Now that we've identified the concepts from our search topics, we need to think of search terms to describe them, including synonyms and similar terms, and singular/plural versions of the concept. Some concepts might have many possible search terms, while others will only have a few.

STEP 2 - Use Boolean Operators and Other Tips to Combine Search Terms

Boolean Operators are the words "AND," "OR," and "NOT," used to describe how your different concepts relate to each other.

• "Concept A" AND "Concept B" will find results that include BOTH concepts.
• "Concept A" OR "Concept B" will find results that include EITHER or BOTH concepts
• "Concept A" NOT "Concept B" will find results that include concept A but DO NOT include concept B

Other tips for typing your search terms into a database:

• Quotation Marks: Use quotation marks to keep multiple words together ("traumatic brain injury" will search for those words in that order, whereas without quotes will search separately for each word)
• Truncation: Use an asterisk at the end of your root word to search for all versions of that word (for instance, nurs* will search for "nurse," "nurses," "nursing," etc.)
• Parentheses: Parentheses can be used to separate concepts, especially in databases where there is only one search box. See example below

Example Search: Our example about childhood concussion protocols could be typed into a database as shown below. 

            (concussion OR "mild traumatic brain injury") AND (protocol OR treatment) AND (children OR pediatric OR adolescent)

STEP 3 - Use Limit Filters to Further Narrow Results

On many databases, the options to further limit the results are shown once a search is conducted. These options often include...

   Publication Date: Limit by the date or year of publication

   Source Type: Limit by the type of source (journal articles, books, chapters, etc.)

   Full Text: Limit to what the library or database has full text access to (rather than showing results that might need to be ordered via interlibrary loan)

   Peer Reviewed: Limit to only show results that were published via a peer review process

   Other Limiters: Some databases offer further limiters such as language, publication or publisher, geography, and others. 

STEP 4 - Adjust and Repeat

Depending on what you're looking for, you may need to adjust your search to continue finding relevant results. Maybe some of the results give you an idea for a new search term to try, or maybe the results are not at all what you were looking for, meaning you'll need to try describing your topic in a different way.

We encourage you to reach out to a librarian for assistance with any or all of this process.