Guides: ENGL 1302: Freshman Composition II: Spring 2024: Search Strategy

Create a Search Strategy

Define your Research Question
- What is the impact of food insecurity on college students?
Determine keywords from the research question
- food insecurity
- college students
Consider synonyms and alternative keywords and phrases
- food insecurity
  - food poverty
  - hunger
  - nutritional deprivation
  - inadequate access to food
  - food deserts
- college students
  - university students
  - young adults
Try combining search terms using Boolean Operators
- "food insecurity" AND "college students"
- ("food insecurity" OR "food desert") AND "college students"

AND
- Use to narrow search results
- All search terms linked by AND must be in the results
OR
- Use to broaden search results
- Connects two or more similar concepts
NOT
- Narrows search results
- Ignores concepts that may be implied by search results
- x NOT y
Use parentheses to group search terms together
- (x OR y) AND (a OR b)

Allows searching that uses symbols to replace the letters in words. It allows the database to search for alternatives to you term.

Truncation allows you to search for all the variations of a word.

Wildcard allows you to search for alternative spellings of a word or multiple possible characters.

Different databases will use different symbols for truncation and wildcard. Check out the help tab to determine what symbol is used.