Starting Your Search

View a demonstration on Creating a Search Strategy

Assignment Requirements

Massey University's OWLL (Online Writing and Learning Link) web site has a very good section on planning and organising assignments.

Clarifying Your Assignment Topic

Start by clarifying your understanding of the topic and asking yourself exactly what it is that you need to know. Then, once you have done this, think carefully about what information you need to be able to meet these requirements.

Ask yourself the following questions:

Do you understand all the terms used in the assignment question or topic?
Can you break the topic down into parts - what are the major concepts and ideas?
What do you already know about the topic?
What length and format is your assignment - e.g. essay, report, presentation? How long does it need to be?
Has your lecturer asked you to use certain types of materials such as popular or scholarly journals, newspapers, or websites?
Does your topic require historical information, material from the recent past or current data? Do you need statistics?

Doing Some Background Reading

Begin with some background reading to familiarise yourself with the topic and find definitions of any concepts that you don't understand or that you wish to clarify. Your textbook and study guide reading lists will be useful.

Some key resources that will help you gather this background information include subject dictionaries and encyclopedias. Our Reference Resources page will help you to find useful background reading material.

Choosing Search Terms

Now choose keywords or phrases that best describe the main terms, concepts or subjects that define your topic. These keywords can then be used to search the Library Catalogue for books or article databases for journal articles and other information. View a tutorial (7 min.).

When you enter search terms into the search box of the Library Catalogue or article databases these terms are matched with records containing these words. Unfortunately, this simple matching process is made complicated by the fact that several different words or phrases can be used to describe one concept and that a single word may have more than one meaning.

Think carefully about other terms that might be used for your topic - words with similar meaning (synonyms).

Use the following hints to guide you when making your list of appropriate keywords:

Try using a dictionary to get a clear definition of terms, as well as locating alternative and/or similar words.
Synonyms and related terms, e.g. rust/corrosion
American terms, e.g. lift/elevator
American spellings, e.g. colour/color
Different word endings, e.g. develop/developed/developing/develops
Acronyms and abbreviations, e.g. Computer Aided Design/CAD

Using Search Terms

Once you have come up with your list of keywords, link your concepts together with AND, and your synonyms or related terms together with OR.

Concept 1

oral OR spoken OR verbal

AND

Concept 2

communication

AND

Concept 3

workplace OR organisation

You can also use a truncation symbol (most often *) to pick up plurals and variant word endings, and a wildcard (often ?) to account for variant spellings.

Your keywords can now be organised into a search strategy, which will look something like:

(oral OR spoken OR verbal) AND communication AND (workplace* OR organi?ation).

Once you have worked out your strategy, you can start searching. Below is an example of how your search strategy will look in a journal article database. You will often find that you need to modify your keywords once you see what your initial search results are. You may find too much or too little information and as a result may need to refine or redefine your topic in light of what you have found. This may involve adding or removing keywords, using AND to narrow your search, or using OR to broaden your search.

For further help with searching see our Advanced Searching section.

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Page authorised by University Librarian
Last updated on Friday 01 July 2011