Once you are ready to start working on your assignment, you can start planning your search. Creating a search strategy will help you target your search and save you valuable time when searching. It is also an important component of your assignment for this unit!
Follow the steps below to create your search strategy.
Identifying the main concepts from your topic is an excellent starting point for your research as they become the foundation of your keyword search.
Let’s look at the sample topic:
“Discuss the role of artificial intelligence in the treatment of heart disease”
List the main concepts from the topic:
Using the main concepts, try a quick search in the library catalogue or one of the databases and see if the results are relevant to your topic.
Authors may use different keywords to describe the same concept. The keywords you identified from your assignment question may not always return the best results. When this happens, it is a good idea to identify alternative keywords (also known as synonyms or similar terms). This will help broaden your search.
For our sample topic, some possible alternative terms could include:
| Artificial intelligence | Treatment | Heart disease |
|---|---|---|
| Generative AI Machine learning |
Therapy Care |
Cardiovascular disease Coronary disease Congenital heart disease |
When searching in the library catalogue and databases, you can combine your keywords using boolean operators AND and OR.
AND is used to combine different search concepts. It narrows your search, instructing the catalogue or database to find only items that contain both of your terms. For example, treatment AND heart disease will only return records containing both the terms.
OR is used to combine similar keywords. It broadens your search, instructing the catalogue or database to find items that contain either of your terms. For example, treatment OR therapy will locate all records containing either of these terms.
For more information, check out this short video What are boolean operators?
You can also use these tips to enhance your search when searching the catalogue or databases.
Phrase searching
Phrase searching means searching for two or more words as an exact phrase. This helps retrieve items where those words appear together in the text. Phrase searching can help to narrow your search. To search for a phrase, enclose the phrase in double quote marks. For example: “cardiovascular disease”
Truncation
The truncation symbol (denoted by an asterisk * ) is useful for finding different endings of a word. It is added after the last common letter of the variations. For example, the search term treat* will search for treated, treatment, treatments, treating etc.
Recording your search strategy
As part of your assignment for this unit, you need to complete a concept grid and search strategy. The templates for these are available from your Blackboard unit under Assessment Resources.
This provides you with some tips on the best places to look for different types of information, as well as strategies that will improve your searching success.
The library catalogue is a good place to start your search. It includes a variety of resources (such as journal articles, books and reports). Use the keywords identified in the creation of your search strategy to begin searching.
Watch the following video for an introduction to searching in the catalogue.
Search tip! For your assignment you need to find recent resources, published in the last 10 years. Once you have performed your search in the library catalogue, you can refine your results using the Creation Date filter in the right menu.
Databases are large, searchable collections of scholarly literature. Databases can cover a range of subject areas (multidisciplinary) or they can concentrate on a specific area (subject specific). They offer more sophisticated search features than the Library Catalogue, which can make it easier to focus your search and find relevant material. A full list of databases is available via the Databases page on the Library website.
We recommend starting with a search in the ProQuest database, using the keywords from your search strategy.
Watch the video below to learn how to search the ProQuest database.
Search tip! If the database you are searching does not provide access to the fulltext of the article, use the red Find it button to see if the fulltext is available in another database.
You may also find the following databases useful for searching on your topic:
CINAHL is a database of nursing and allied health literature.
Provides access to peer-reviewed journal articles and other resources in a range of subject areas with a focus on Australian content.
Government departments mainly publish their reports online. It is best to check out the government department or agency website to search for reports.
The following websites are useful sources for reports:
Tips for searching for reports
Search engines such as Google are useful when searching for reports. You can limit your Google search to look for information from specific types of website (e.g. government websites) or specific filetypes (e.g. PDFs):
Note: Google searches will often return large numbers of results, so consider using the Advanced Search option and limiting your search by date (e.g. last 5/10 years).
For your assignment, you may be required to find and report on relevant statistics related to the health funding system or health issue of Australia and/or another country.
Statistical data is not always easy to locate as there is no one single source for this type of information. Most statistics are published by national or state government agencies. However, they can also be found in scholarly journals, reports, websites, books and databases.
The following websites are useful sources of statistics:
Australian statistics
International statistics
Tips for searching for statistics
Example: heart disease AND Germany AND statistics
Example: heart disease AND incidence OR prevalence OR epidemiology AND Germany
Example: heart disease AND statistics AND Europe
It is important that you evaluate the information you discover on the internet to ensure the source you are using is credible. A key consideration when deciding whether to include a source in your assignment is whether the author and the information is credible. As you critically read a text, ask yourself the following questions:
Who? Perform an assessment of the author or organisation responsible for the information. Are they suitably qualified to be writing on the topic? Is there evidence of any bias or a conflict of interest?
Why? Why was the content created? Is its purpose to inform, persuade, entertain or sell a product? Only giving one side of the story or using emotive or incendiary language could suggest a goal to persuade or manipulate a reader.
When? For some research areas, the timeliness of the information will be important and many assignment briefs will note a timeframe of publication that is acceptable. You need to know when the information was published or updated.
When you are evaluating a source you may need to validate the author’s claims and conclusions by looking for confirmation or support elsewhere on the Internet, a technique known as lateral reading. Watch the video below to learn more about using lateral reading to evaluate information.