Answered By: Victoria Peters
Last Updated: Apr 10, 2025     Views: 4

It can be intimidating to use the library and start a research project, but fear not we (the librarians and your professor) are here every step of the way.

Suggestions as you begin your research:

  • It helps to start by writing a list of terms that you will use in your search.
  • Keep notes as you research, the terms you used, where you searched, what you found.
  • Once you have search terms do some background research to add more terms to your list using an encyclopedia or dictionary.
  • Now you have a bit more information on your topic, start looking for more in-depth information.
  • Search for books, use the bibliography from specific chapters to find even more relevant books or articles.
  • Use library databases (like JSTOR or Project Muse) to search for articles.

What If:

Your Search Returns No References or Too Few References
  • Look for misspellings in your strategy.
  • Decrease the number of concepts searched.
  • Try a broader search term.
  • Use a term from the thesaurus (i.e., MeSH or subject heading list) for searching.
  • Use the Related Articles or Similar Articles feature.
  • Check for missing or incorrect field qualifiers.
  • Remove terms that are unlikely to be used by an author.
  • Replace terms that are too general or too specific.
  • Increase the number of synonyms or alternatives for a term.
  • Use a truncation symbol at the end of a term to pick up variant endings (check out the linked image for other operators).
  • Try running the search on earlier years (back files) of the database.
  • Try a different database.
Your Search Returns Too Many References
  • Choose the most specific subject headings or most significant key words.
  • Use subheadings to narrow the focus of the subject heading if appropriate.
  • Increase the number of search concepts that are AND'ed together (check out the linked image for other operators).
  • Use fewer synonyms for terms.
  • Make a term from the thesaurus (i.e. subject heading list or controlled vocabulary) the main focus of the article ("major" in PubMed and "focus" in CINAHL).
  • Limit to review articles.
  • Limit your search to type of article, language, age group, current years, etc.
  • Ask for significant words to be in the TITLE of the article.

From TMC Libraries

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