Search Terms
Five Steps to Generating Search Terms
- Have a well-formed research question
- Extract core terms from this research question
- Brainstorm a list of alternative terms or phrases for each core term
- Organize the list of terms and phrases by creating a hierarchy, indicating broader and narrower terms for each core term
- Identify which terms you would combine to conduct a search
Databases
Password: bengalsPass
Google Tips
- If you aren’t getting the search results you want change your search words. Make them more specific or less specific, use synonyms, or rephrase.
- Use quotation marks to search for an exact phrase.
- use search term site:domain to pull up websites with only a specific domain
- Adding ~ before a word will search for its synonyms.
- Add a dash (–) before a word or site to exclude all results that include that word. This is especially useful for words with multiple meanings, like Jaguar the car brand and jaguar the animal. e.g. jaguar speed -car
