Whether you start with a broad search and narrow or a specific search and expand, expert researchers exhibit two attributes:
This page will cover Advanced Search Techniques (phrases, truncation, excluding terms), Following Citation Trails, and Using Google Scholar. Additional tabs provide research sources and guidance for specific topics:
Often it is helpful to search things by a specific phrase and not the individual words separately, which you can do in databases and in Google by using quotation marks around the phrase.
Useful for:
Many words have multiple forms that you many want to include in your search. In most databases and in Google you can use the asterisk (*) symbol at the end of the trunk of the work. For example: Arch* will retrieve Architect, Architecture, Architectural, and more terms.
Useful for:
Sometimes you need to remove terms and concepts that are gearing your search away from your goals.
In many databases you can use NOT before the search field in the advanced search.
In Google, you use minus (-) sign immediately before the term you want to exclude.
Useful for:
When we follow a citation trail, we do one of two things:
Some resources and databases make this easy by having links within the article page and may even have additional links to all the author's other publications or other article's that cite the same sources.
Forwards Searching = on the upper right, the first icon with the double arrows going up
Backwards Searching = on the upper right, the second icon with the arrow pointing down
Google Scholar can be a good way to search scholarly content available from publishers websites, higher education repositories, and open access sites from around the world
Tips: