Skip to Main Content

Plan your search

Plan your search

Planning your search is key to getting the most relevant and high quality results. The following video will help you get started.

Video length: 2 min 26 sec

Key points from the video
  • Searching for your whole assignment is not very effective
  • Identify the key concepts in your question or topic
  • Think about what other words (similar words or alternative terms) might be used to describe the key concepts
  • Connect your concepts using AND and OR
  • You can change your search as you find more information

Look at the following resources for more information:

Step 1: Understand your topic

Use the course readings, an encyclopedia, dictionary, or reliable websites to understand your topic. Consider:

  • What do you need to do?
  • What do you know? Or need to explore further?
  • Do you need to define any terms?
  • What types of evidence do you need?
  • Does information need to be current?
  • Do any theories apply to your topic?
  • Do you need facts and figures, or statistics?

Useful guidelines:

Step 2: Identify keywords

Typing your question into Google or the Library Collection is not the best way to search.

Mapping out your search can be a good place to start:

  • Identify the keywords (also known as key concepts) in the assignment question - these form the foundation of your search.
  • Remove task words (also known as instruction words) from your assignment question - these are the words telling you what to do with the key concepts (e.g. analyse, compare, discuss).

Test your knowledge by identifying the keywords in the activity below.

Step 3: Consider alternative keywords

Searching is very literal - you will only find the terms you search for. Your next step should therefore be to identify the similar or alternative keywords for each concept that may be used by authors:

  • Use an online thesaurus
  • Conduct some basic searching using your identified keywords and note other words that are commonly used in the papers you find

Also consider:

  • Plurals and different word forms (police vs policeman vs policewoman)
  • Different spellings (criminalisation vs criminalization) and hyphenated words (police officer vs police-officer)
  • Acronyms or abbreviations (Australia, AUS)

A mind map or table can help you brainstorm alternative keywords and organise your thinking.

Match the alternative keywords to the two concepts in the following interactive activity to test your knowledge.

Step 4: Connect your keywords

Once you have identified your keywords and found alternative keywords, you need to connect these to put your search together.

Use the following operator words in your searching to command the interface how to search for your keywords:

  • OR: to connect similar keywords
  • AND: to connect different concepts 
  • NOT: to exclude words from the search (use cautiously when necessary or you may exclude useful results)

You can use "quotation marks" to keep phrases together:

  • police OR "law enforcement officers"
  • police AND "criminal justice system"

Tip: Combining AND / OR can yield unexpected results. To avoid this, place brackets ( ) around each set/s of terms that use OR. For example:

  • (police OR "law enforcement officers") AND "justice system"

Test your knowledge by completing the interactive below.