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Search Basics
Questions to consider:
- How does background reading help me locate relevant sources?
- What search tool(s) might contain sources relevant to my topic?
- What are and how do I find scholarly sources?
- How (and when) can AND and double quotes help me when searching?
You are not alone if you struggle finding relevant and reliable information sources for your course assignments. Most students experience this. The good news is that by practicing a small handful of techniques, you can become a search pro! Let's take a look, starting with this brief video explaining why you probably won't find that one perfect article.
An effective search starts with getting a handle on the scope of the issue(s) involved, and the terminology experts use in the literature. You can save time and effort by spending a little time doing some background reading on your topic. For example, if I have an assignment to write about the impact of nurse burnout on patient safety, a great place to start is to see if Wikipedia might have an entry on this issue and/or one adjacent to it. Reading through such an entry or two would better equip me to understand the scope and history of the issue, as well as understand any relevant terminology. This essential research technique is called background reading.
The next step is to assess what search tools (journal article and ebook databases in the library, websites, etc.) might contain sources relevant to your topic. There are 2 primary ways to search the literature on any topic using the library:
- OneSearch - the search box on the library home page. This searches across almost all of the library's collections at the same time. As you can imagine, it searches across many millions of items and across all disciplines, mostly within the scholarly and professional/trade journal literature. This is a great place to start.
- Nursing and other discipline-specific databases. You can access these through the library's Nursing and Allied Health Subject Guide (or other Subject Guides as necessary). CINAHL Plus with Full-Text and Ovid Nursing specifically search the nursing literature and are great tools to use. For health/medicine topics not restricted to nursing, MEDLINE Plus is a great tool. In addition, check out the other tabs within the Guide for quality open web sources and other resources.
Practice exercise 1: search tools
Carry out the searches next to each database listed below. What differences and similarities do you see in the kinds of results you get and in the limit options offered between the multi-disciplinary OneSearch and the discipline-specific CINAHL (CINAHL stands for Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature)?
- OneSearch (this is the same as the search box on the library home page) - try this search: nursing and burnout and "patient safety". On the results page (left side) look for a 'scholarly/peer-reviewed' limit option.
- CINAHL Plus with Full-Text - try this search: burnout and "patient safety" [because CNAHL only searches the nursing literature, we do not need to include that word in the search - all results will be related to nursing!]. Note also that because almost all content indexed in CINAHL is from scholarly journals, there isn't a 'peer-reviewed' limit option unless you go into the 'Advanced Search.'
- On the CINAHL results page, scroll down the page a little and look for the "Geography" limit option in the left column. Click on it to see sub-options. How do you think this option might be useful?
Scholarly sources FAQ
- What are scholarly sources? Those journal articles (also called academic or peer-reviewed articles: example) and books (called 'scholarly monographs': example) written by experts whose target audience is other experts in that field. They usually contain lots of discipline-specific jargon, in-text citations, and labeled sections like Introduction, Methodology, Conclusion, etc.
- Why can't I find scholarly sources on my topic? Most articles in the library are scholarly. In order for them to get published they need to contain original research, which means they are usually very narrow in scope, covering just a small aspect of typical student assignment topics. This means you will not likely find scholarly articles that neatly summarize your broad topic and may instead need to access multiple narrower articles to get a fuller picture of your topic. Most scholarly articles can also be hard to read and understand; this is something all students experience (but it gets easier the more you do it and the better your note-taking habits are).
- What is a peer-reviewed article? Most scholarly articles are peer-reviewed, though not all. Before it is published, submitted articles are sent out to other experts in the field (the authors' peers) to read and make comments and suggestions for revision. The process often takes many months to complete but ensures a higher level of quality and reliability. This is why your instructors assign such readings and often want you to use them as sources in your own academic writing.
- What are professional/trade organization sources? While these are not usually scholarly/peer-reviewed, they are written by and aimed at an audience of people working in a specific profession or trade. They can be a journal, magazine, e-newsletter (sometimes these show up in library search results), or website published by government or professional association. These types of sources can be reliable and important sources of information for a variety of topics, so don't discount them! But, always critically evaluate any information sources you use from the open web!
- How do I find scholarly/peer-reviewed journal articles? The Online Library's OneSearch (the search box in the upper left of the library home page) has a limit option, on the left side of the results page after you do a search, for "in Scholarly/Peer-Reviewed journal only." Many of the library's discipline-specific databases contain a similar limit option. In addition, the OneSearch includes a "Peer-Reviewed" tag under relevant results to help you identify such articles.
- How can I effectively read and understand scholarly sources?
- Scan key sections of the article first: the abstract, introduction, and conclusion. These sections will contain summaries of key points of the article. You can then read the full article armed with this overview.
- A good notetaking habit is the key to understanding any scholarly source. Good notetaking includes more than just highlighting text. Instead, or in addition, write down notes in your own words summarizing key passages or ideas that could be useful to you for writing a paper or understanding how the content fits into your understanding of the topic. This can be done in the margins of a printout or on a separate piece of paper or Word document (make sure you include the citation info of the article it goes with!).
Once you settle on a search tool, you can construct some searches. Here's some steps to help you do that:
There is no one way to search the literature to find the most important sources related to your topic. However, there are some steps and habits of mind you can use to be more effective and efficient:
- Approach your topic with an open and critical mind: be mindful of your own worldview and how universal human biases can blind us to some perspectives: Critical Thinking Cheatsheet (Questions to Ask)
- Give some thought to what kinds of sources will be useful to you. While scholarly journal articles and books (sometimes called monographs) should make up the bulk of your sources, some topics may lend themselves to other types of sources such as government or non-governmental reports and white papers, data sets or statistics, conference proceedings, and more: see Publication Types. See also: Finding & working with Scholarly Sources.
- What you type into a search box will depend both on your topic and what search tool (database) you are using. For example, if I'm using the OneSearch (which searches many collections across all disciplines at once) to look for sources on stress among nurses, I might start with a search like this: stress AND nursing. However, if I'm using the CINAHL search tool (searches just the nursing literature) instead, I might not need to include 'nursing' in my search at all. Here are some general search tips:
- Type in words or phrases that concisely describe main concepts, with AND between each concept. Ignore adjectives and special punctuation - focus on the words directly relevant to your topic:
- opioids and addiction and treatment
- diversity and staffing and nursing
- Put double quotes around exact phrases of 2+ words (when you need to search using a commonly-used exact phrase). This will limit results to those that contain the exact phrase as typed inside those double quotes. Examples:
- "child abuse training"
- “evidence based practice” and "New York State" and hospitals
- "patient education" and rural and pregnancy
- Craft multiple searches using alternate search words/phrases to see what works and find the best results
- opioids and teenagers and prevention
- "prescription drugs" and adolescents and prevention
- "opioid epidemic" and adolescents and "prevention programs"
- Avoid using generic search words (especially verbs and adjectives) that will not help narrow the results. Examples to avoid: impact, effect, best, research, study, paper, etc.
- Type in words or phrases that concisely describe main concepts, with AND between each concept. Ignore adjectives and special punctuation - focus on the words directly relevant to your topic:
Example search in the CINAHL database:
Practice exercise 2: create searches
Given the following research question, craft at least 2 different searches using different search words: What impact does nurse cultural competence training have on diabetes patient compliance and outcomes?
Hints: 1. Check this Wikipedia article (and this one) for definitions and possible alternate terminology. 2. Try some searches on OneSearch and/or the CINAHL Plus database to see what might work best.
Submit your searches here and to see some examples of possible searches.
Search Results Page
Regardless of the library database you are using, your search results page is going to have many of the same basic features:
- Usually on the left side, some options for limiting your search results (e.g., by date, by scholarly/peer-review or publication type).
- You will see the number of results your search got, and often options to sort results (for example by date) above the first result.
- The search results themselves. The title will be a link to more information about that search result.
- Either an icon to get to the full text (Go to Full-Text, PDF Full-Text, etc.), or a link to check for full text in another database (e.g., Full-Text Finder).
- Usually to the right of each result, options to save the item for later use (pin or folder icon, etc.), get a permalink, or create a formatted citation for it. It's always a good idea to save items you might need to cite or access later, so you don't have to search for them again. Log back into the database used (OneSearch, EBSCOHost, etc.) any time later to access your saved items.
Practice exercise 3: search results
If still open, go back to your CINAHL results page (if not, carry out a new search in the CINAHL library database). Now try the following steps with that set of results:
- Try using the publication date limit option in the left column (it's down the page a little) and limit the results to only the last 5 years. You can use the slider or the text fields displaying the dates.
- Look at the results themselves. Click on one that has the "Full-text Finder" link under it. In many cases, this should still take you to the full-text of the article, just in a different database. However, not every article is available immediately in our collections. If this is the case, you'll instead see a record display for the item in OneSearch, with a section labeled 'How to Get It." This means that article is not available in the library. However, by clicking the Sign In link and then, after login, clicking the "Request from another library via Inter-library loan" link, you can submit the displayed ILL request form and, if available, get the article scanned in and a link sent to you to access the article, usually within 48 hours. This can also be done when using the OneSearch search tool directly. This is how you request access to articles that aren't available in the library (ILL cannot be used to request books or multimedia items).
