Undergraduate Research Center: The Research Process

From Research Question to Search Terms

Once you have a clear Research Question, it’s important to search using essential keywords or phrases that represent the key concepts of your topic.

Example:

How can green infrastructure projects in California help cities mitigate the impacts of climate change? 

Identify keywords and concepts

Break down your research question into its main concepts and corresponding keywords to generate search terms. 

Main Concepts:

• impacts of climate change, California cities, green infrastructure projects

Keywords: 

• green infrastructure, climate change, California, cities

Identify related terms

Brainstorm synonyms, broader terms, and narrower terms to create a word bank. Mix & match keywords while searching. If you keep using the same combination of search terms, you will continue getting the same results. Use different keywords together and keep track of what works for your topic.

Synonyms

city ---> urban, town

Broad vs Narrow

climate change ---> drought, flooding, temperature rise

green infrastructure---> tree planting, bioswales, permeable pavement

Combine Search Terms

Combining your search terms with AND directs the database to make sure all of your keywords and concepts are included in your results.

urban AND bioswales AND flooding

5 Database Search Tips

1. Use OR for related terms — groundwater OR aquafer
2. Use “ “ for exact phrasing — “ Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi ”
3. Use * for wildcard searching — microb* = microb-e, microb-ial, microb-iota, microb-iome
4. Use a Title search — “Phytoremediation potential of willow trees for aquifers…”
5. Use Subject headings

Sample search:

Related Terms 

Using the Boolean Operator OR will broaden your search results. In this case, using OR will retrieve search results containing either the keywords groundwater or aquafer.

Exact or "Proximal" Phrasing

Phrase searching narrows your search results by allowing you to define precisely how you want the words to appear with an exact combination and/or spelling. Be careful when you use phrase searching! If you put too many words in quotations, the database will most likely not find any results. Only to use phrase searching on established phrases - words that you can reasonably expect other authors to use.

Wildcard Search

Using a wildcard for truncation enables searching for a word that could have multiple endings. The symbol for truncation is usually an * at the point where the spelling of the word could change. 

Asterisk wildcard (*) - Is used between words where variations may be possible. 

Question mark wildcard (?) - Is used to replace an unknown character. 

Use the wildcard operators ? and * to search for word variations:

• Wom?n (searches for woman and women)
• Recycl* (searches for recycle, recycling, recyclable)

Title Search

A title search retrieves any records with your matching search terms in an article's title. Conduct an Advanced Search and use the drop-down menu in the search field to select "Title" or "Document Title."

Subject Headings

Subject headings are index terms that are found in bibliographic records that describe what the resource is about. Subject headings come from controlled vocabularies, so that users can find resources by official subject classifications. The advantage of using Subject Headings is that terms are pre-defined and have synonyms included.