What kind of research has been done on your topic? Where can you find original research articles that have been published in peer-reviewed journals?
Use this page to learn about sources for finding peer reviewed original research articles. Also, learn about the nature and characteristics of peer reviewed and original research articles.
Once you have narrowed your topic, try to identify the most important ideas. These ideas are your keywords, and will help you search for sources more effectively.
Example topic: How does social media impact the mental health of teenagers in the United States?
Keywords: social media, mental health, teenagers, and United States
Most words have multiple synonyms, try to come up with at least one for each identified keyword. If you are having trouble finding sources, synonyms can help you broaden your search to include more commonly used words within the research.
Keyword: teenagers
Synonyms: adolescents, young adults, high schooler/middle schooler
Most library databases have search tools, or filters, built in. Filters allow you to quickly limit your results so you can find relevant sources. Try some of these filters:
Boolean operators are conjunction words used to navigate databases. They connect search terms to find the sources you need -- or omit the ones you don't need!
When you search databases, you do not enter full sentences. You use boolean operators to connect your searched words!
Concepts | Search Examples | Results |
---|---|---|
AND | "food waste" AND "middle class" | Results will include both terms |
OR | "food waste" OR "food loss" | Results will include one or both terms |
NOT | household NOT retail | Excludes results with the term following NOT |
Use the search operator AND to only find sources that mention both keywords. A basic search string would connect all of your keywords with the AND operator. This search will bring back fewer results than searching either keyword on its own.
Example: "social media" AND teenagers
Use the search operator OR to expand your search with additional keywords. This is a great place to use the synonyms we identified earlier. This search will find sources that include either word so you will get more results than if you searched with just one keyword.
Example: (teenagers OR adolescents OR "young adults")
*Note: For best results enclose OR statements in parentheses.
Use the search operator NOT to remove undesired results.
Example: "social media" AND teenagers NOT "video games"
Quotation marks are also commonly used when searching databases. Place quotation marks around phrases to search sources for a specific term that contains more than one word. This is important to remember, because if you do not do this you will find a plethora of sources that contain the individual words from your search term, but not the term itself.
Example:
"Civil War" will provide you with sources that contain the specific term, "Civil War".
Civil War, in contrast, will provide you with sources that contain "Civil War," but will also show you everything that also has "civil" and "war" in its work.
Truncation (symbolized with *, an asterisk) is used to find search terms that may have the same root word, but different endings.
Examples:
immuni* = immunity, immunization, immunizations
hum* = human, hummmus, humor
teen* = teen, teens, teenager, teenage
technolog* = technology, technologies, technological
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