Academic Skills

Before you can start searching for information, you need to figure out what it is you're searching for. If you have a specific assignment brief then this is where you should start. If you are coming up with a topic yourself it is a good idea to write down your title or hypothesis to help you get plan your literature search.

If you're finding it difficult to pick apart your essay question, check out our guide to understanding the assignment.

Here's an example to get us started on how to identify what concepts you need to research:

Discuss the impact of using IT on literacy skills among teenagers

Now let's break it down so we can start planning what to search for:

Concept 1

Concept 2

Concept 3

Using the above example, you can easily pick out some obvious key terms and type them into a search box; however, the chances are that you won't get a wide enough list of results, or perhaps not many results at all. This is because you need to think of alternative search terms to make sure the database search engine can find what you're looking for.

Synonyms

A synonym is a word or phrase which means the same thing (or is very closely related) to another word. You should identifya few synonyms for each concept and then combine these together to get more accurate search results. For example, synonyms of "IT" might include "computers", "technology" or perhaps "social media".

Formal and technical terms

• Are there any common abbreviations? e.g. try searching for "CBT" as well as "cognitive behavioural therapy"
• Are there any scientific or technical terms for your topic? e.g. try searching for "hypertension" as well as "high blood pressure"

American spelling and terms

• Do Americans spell it differently? Some search engines won't search for alternative spellings so you may need to search for them individually. For example, try searching for "behaviour" and "behaviour"
• Are there other alternative terms which are more common in America or other foreign countries? e.g. try searching for "kindergarten" as well as "nursery"

Once you've identified some more keywords, try combining them together to see if they improve your search results. Many search engines allow you to use the words AND, OR and NOT to add, combine and exclude words. These are called Boolean operators, and they are always written in capital letters.

AND

In step 1 we identified 3 separate concepts withing one essay question: "the use of IT", "literacy skills" and "teenagers". You can use AND to stitch together these separate concepts. It lets the database know that the search results must include both concept A and concept B. For example, you might search for "literacy AND teenagers" to make sure you are not getting results that only mention adult literacy.

OR

In step 1 you identified the concepts and stitched these together with AND. In step 2 we identified synonyms, and these need to be combioned using OR. For example, "literacy OR reading". Using OR means that you will get results including one term or the other; if you used AND with synonyms, you would accidentally exclude useful results that didn't use both keywords.

You can use as many synonyms here as you like, but they must all be separated by an OR. For example, "literacy OR reading OR dyslexia".

NOT

You can use NOT to exclude search results that have a specific word in them. However, you must be very careful when using NOT, as it may cause you to miss good articles which mention the excluded word as part of setting out the scope of their research. For example, an article about teenagers might still mention adults, so you wouldn't want to search for "teenagers NOT adults".

A good time to use NOT is when your keywords might have multiple meanings, a bit like Wikipedia's disambiguation tool. For example, searching for "Amazon NOT rainforest" would bring back results about the online company, not the South American rainforest.

Combining AND and OR

You can group synonyms within brackets, and then link each set of brackets with AND to combine everything together. For example, you might search for "(computers OR smartphones) AND literacy AND (teenagers OR adolescents)".

When you've got a list of search results, you need to start looking through them to decide whether any of them are useful for you. Follow these steps to quickly sort through what you've found:

1. First, read the abstract, blurb or contents page. This is to decide whether or not the item is relevant. If not, move on to the next search result.
2. If the item looks relevant, skip to the conclusion or discussion/summary. This will quickly tell you what the main arguments or findings are, and how that might shape what you write in your essay.
3. Lastly, read the introduction. You might only skim read this at this stage. The introduction will give you a bit of background information on the context of the research

Important: don't discard a book or article simply because it disagrees with what you wanted to say in your essay. It could still be useful to discuss it, either to challenge its findings or to show the breadth of your background research.

You might also want to save or discard the item based on other information such as date, country of publication, or lack of credibility. See our guide to critical analysis for more tips.

Once you've evaluated the search results using the tips in Step 4, you can decide whether to refine your search. You might do this by expaning or narrowing it.

Narrowing your search

If your search result contains millions of items there are several ways of narrowing it down. Firstly, look around to see if the database has any filters. Depending on your topic, you might want to add some filters such as excluding results before a certain date, including results from a specific country.

On some databases you can also filter by material/source type. For example, you might want to narrow it down to news articles, or to academic journals, or to ebooks.

Finally, you can also narrow your search by adding more search terms. Look at your synonyms and linked concepts again. Can you think of any more specific keywords? Can you add in another concept using AND?

Expanding your search

If you didn't get many search results or could find anything relevant, your best bet is to go back to steps 1 and 2. See if you can come up with more synonyms, or exclude search terms that might be too specific. For example, you might search again for 

If you have used AND and OR, make sure you have used them correctly so you are not accidentally excluding things. Check whether you need to put brackets around some search terms.

If you still can't find anything useful, try searching a different database. You can also contact the Academic Services team for advice.