Finals Week Toolkit

Use a mind map or other brainstorming technique to visualize the major concepts of your research question.

These techniques can help you break your large question down into smaller topics, and will help you focus your writing. You can also use them to find meaningful keywords.

Plan your search strategy using Boolean operators.

What's a "Boolean operator"? The words AND, OR, and NOT have special meaning in the databases. AND will narrow results by combining concepts. OR will expand a search, allowing you to find multiple forms or iterations of a word. NOT will exclude terms from your results, allowing you to focus on what you really want.

Use a variety of search terms for each concept, and document your search process.

Unfortunately, it is rare that the "perfect paper" that combines all of your search concepts exists. Instead of search many different concepts in one search, focus on using multiple terms for a single concept using the OR operator. Write down all of the search strategies and databases you've used. This will help you visualize gaps in your research process and help make you a more efficient researcher.

Search more than one database or library resource.

Sure there is some overlapping content, but different databases have different purposes. Research tends to be multi- and interdisciplinary. By searching in just one specific discipline, you may miss related research. Likewise, searching only in multidisciplinary databases ignores the depth of content available in discipline-specific databases.

Use citations in an article to find more research.

Good peer-reviewed research will have an extensive list of citations at the end. If one looks interesting to you, try to find it in our databases (PS, librarians can help with this). Additionally, use Google Scholar to find research that cited the paper you are reading. Learn more about how to use Google Scholar by visiting our blog and searching "Google Scholar."