If you are a coursework student, it is strongly recommended that you read the assessment details in your Course Outline and course site.
Planning your search is key to getting the most out of your search results. The following video will help you get started.
Video Length: (2 min 26 sec)
The first step in developing an effective search strategy involves identifying key concepts or main ideas (also known as keywords or search terms) from your assignment. These terms will become your search terms.
|
Example How has social media affected modern journalism? Search terms
|
Task words (also known as instruction words) are telling you what to do with the key concepts (e.g. analyse, compare, discuss).
Use these with caution as they can narrow the results too much. Consider taking them out or adding them to see the different results.
|
Example How has social media affected modern journalism? Task words
|
Authors may refer to topics using different words. Add alternative words to expand and include relevant results.
|
Example Energy Alternative words
|
Use a thesaurus and consider:
Once you have identified your keywords and found alternative keywords, you need to connect these to put your search together.
Use the following operators (also known as booleans) to indicate how you want to search for your keywords:
| Operator | Function | Example |
| OR | Connects similar keywords | Gas OR petrol |
| AND | Connects different keywords | Australia AND migration |
| "Quotation marks" | Keeps phrases together | "Social media" |
| (Brackets) | Groups similar words together | ("Cultural diversity" OR Multiculturalism) |
| Asterisk* | Truncation - Placed at the end of words to find alternative word endings | Market* = marketing, markets |
You don't have to use all the operators to search and can modify your search strategy by eliminating/adding key concepts.
Example search: