11 Building a Search
The first step to searching any database is to build your search. In order to do the most effective literature search, you need to generate good search terms and combine them effectively.
Steps to a Search
- State your research topic
- Identify the main concepts in your topic
- Generate keywords for each concept
- Build your search (using AND, OR)
- Run search, evaluate and update
1. State your research topic
What are you interested in studying? What information do you want to find?
4. Build your search (using AND, OR)
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OR combines related words in a concept OR gets you “more” |
AND combines separate concepts AND is “demanding” (so you get less) |
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Final search:
(semiconductor OR ZnO) AND (nanowire* OR nanostructure* OR nanotech*) AND (“solar cell*” OR photovoltaic*)
Building a search:
- Truncation (*) – search all possible endings of a word
- symbol* → symbol, symbols, symbolism…
- Wildcard (?) – replace a single letter
- Wom?n → woman, women
- Phrases (“”) – search a phrase together
- “global warming” → finds exact phrase rather than “global” AND “warming”
- Parentheses () – keep OR terms together so that the search combines the OR terms before it adds the AND terms to the search
- (cat OR kitten) AND (dog OR puppy)
- Not all databases use parentheses (arXiv)
5. Run search, evaluate and update
Run your search in your database of choice. Take a look at your result lists, is it relevant? Look at individual search results for more potential keyword terms to add your search.
Common problems:
- Too many results
- Try fewer OR terms or more AND terms
- Too few results
- Try more OR terms or fewer AND terms
- Use general keywords instead of specific
- Irrelevant results
- Check that you didn’t truncate a word too soon (ie photo* will get me a lot of irrelevant results)
- Use more specific keywords instead of general
Next, update your search strategy and search again!
Build your own search
Build a search using a Search Strategy Worksheet
When you search, always keep track of the searches you have done, so that you don’t need to repeat work later. Use the Search Strategy Worksheet, a search log or any other method to keep track of searches.
Search Log Example:
| Database | Search | Date | Notes |
| Web of Science | (semiconductor OR ZnO) AND (nanowire* OR nanostructure* OR nanotech*) AND (“solar cell*” OR photovoltaic*”) | Jun 7 | Too broad |
| Web of Science | (semiconductor OR ZnO) AND (nanowire* OR nanostructure* OR nanotech*) AND (“solar cell*” OR photovoltaic*”) AND fabricat* | Jun 7 | Good results about fabrication |
Tips
- Keep track of your keywords and searches to save time and avoid repeated work
- Look at the terminology used in useful articles to add more terms to your search
- Always search in multiple databases
- Each database will look a little different, but we can transfer our search strategy to each database
- Searching is iterative! Search, look at your results, then update your search
