Guides: Pharmacy: Search for your assignment

STEP 1: Understand your topic

Before you start it is important to understand your topic:

What is it you need to do?
Do you need to define any terms?
What types of information do you need?

Learn more:

Assignment planning
A short guide on the steps you need to plan out your assignment successfully.
Understanding assignments and instruction words
A short guide on how to analyse your question.
Study help: Scholarly sources explained (2:22)
A brief explanation of scholarly sources and peer-review journal articles.

STEP 2: Study help: Plan your search video

Watch the following video (2:26) to get you started:

Key points from the video

Searching for your whole assignment is not very effective
Mapping out your search is a good place to start
Identify the key concepts in your question or topic
You don't need to search for task words
Use double quotation marks (" ") to search for two or more words together as a phrase
Think about what other words (synonyms and alternative terms) might be used to describe the key concepts
You can use acronyms, but you should search for the full terms as well
To find fewer results, add different concepts using AND (e.g. rural AND Australia)
To find more results, add synonyms or alternative terms, to your search using OR (e.g. "renewable energy" OR solar OR wind)
You can change your search as you find more information

Learn more:

How to plan your search (PDF)
A short guide on steps you need to plan your search, including how to combine your search terms using OR, AND, NOT.

STEP 3: Identify key concepts

First you begin by identifying the key concepts of your question or topic.

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. compare, discuss, analyse)

Note: you will need to have a topic or research question to continue on this page!

STEP 4: Identify alternative keywords

Once you've identified the key concepts in your assignment topic, you will need to find similar or alternative keywords. You may want to consider:

Plurals, different word forms (stutter, stuttering)
Different spellings (behavior, behaviour)
Hyphenated words (self-esteem, self esteem)
Acronyms or abbreviations (cognitive behavioural therapy, CBT)

Tips:

Consider using a mindmap or table to help you brainstorm alternative keywords
Use a thesaurus to help you find similar or alternative keywords
Do some basic initial searching using the keywords you have already identified to see what other words are used in the papers you find

STEP 5: Connect concepts & keywords

Use the following operator words (ORs / ANDs) to indicate how you want your keywords to be searched:

OR to connect different terms within the same concept
AND to connect different concepts

STEP 6: Modify your search

The following special symbols may further improve your search:

An asterisk * finds a word with alternative endings. E.g. adolescen*= adolescent, adolescents, adolescence

"double quotation marks" keep two or more words together in the exact order. E.g. "speech therapy"

Search all the variations of a word separately. E.g. well-being/wellbeing or healthcare/health care

Interactive worksheet

Use the interactive worksheet below to help you identify your key concepts and alternative keywords.