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Peabody Library Search Strategy Worksheet

Define Your Topic

1. State your research topic in one or two sentences. Be specific as possible and underline the key words and phrases.

 

 

 

Example: How does violence in the media affect young children?

 

Identify Your Concepts

2. Number your underlined keywords from your stated topic. These keywords are now the concepts which makeup a unique search topic. Most topics can be broken down into two or three main concepts.

Concept 1	Concept 2	Concept 3
_________	_________	_________

Examples:

violence (1)

media (2)

children (3)

Now that you have created your concepts, create a list of synonyms for each concept. Synonyms and related terms help when you are ready to conduct your search in a database.

Concept 1		Concept 2		Concept 3
_________	AND	_________	AND	_________
OR		OR		OR
_________	AND	_________	AND	_________
OR		OR		OR
_________	AND	_________	AND	_________

Example:

Concept 1		Concept 2		Concept 3
violence	AND	media	AND	children
OR		OR		OR
aggression	AND	television	AND	youth
OR		OR		OR
aggressive	AND	movies	AND	teenagers

 

Perform Your Search

3. Construct your search using Boolean operators, truncation, and parentheses.

Example:

Create your search:

• "AND" narrows your search by requiring that one of your terms from each
• "OR" broadens your search by gathering items in which one or more of terms appear
• "NOT" narrows your search further by excluding a particular term
• Use a truncation symbol (* ? !) to search for words that contain a common thread. Right-hand truncation is the most common form of truncation. It allows you to search for the first few letters of a word and retrieve additional letters to the right.

Examples: (violen* OR aggressi*) AND (kid* OR child*)

 

 

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Last updated November 23, 2005.