Research Basics

Strategic Information Gathering

Choosing Information Sources

Books for Research

Advantages: scholarly research in depth, useful for background information and context for your topic

Disadvantages: lengthy publication timeline so most recent information may not be included

Articles for Research

Advantages: scholarly articles are often peer-reviewed, contain original research, and provide a more focused treatment of a topic

Disadvantages: narrow or specific focus, not the best resource for general interest

Websites for Research

Advantages: may provide up-to-the-minute coverage of a topic,  government websites are a useful source of data and statistics

Disadvantages: no formal quality control may result in biased, outdated, or inaccurate information

Choosing Search Terminology

Natural Language Searching

What it is: using full sentences or long phrases in a search box

Example: How does global warming affect the economy in poor countries?

How it works on the web: search engines like Google ignore "stop words" like articles (a, an, the) and prepositions (in, from, for), retrieve results where remaining words are present, may return too many search results

How it works in a database: the database engine searches for all of the words in the search box, may not find results where all are present

Phrase Searching

What it is: enclosing phrases in quotation marks in the search box

Example: "global warming" instead of global warming

How it works: search engine finds results where the words appear in exact order, producing fewer & more focused results

Keyword Searching

What it is: choosing and combining descriptive words from your thesis or research question for online searches, a more efficient method than natural language searching.

Example: “global warming” + economy

How it works: search engine looks for a small number of carefully chosen search terms so results are a closer match to the topic

Boolean Searching

Boolean Searching refers to the practice of inserting a Boolean Operator (AND, OR, NOT) between search terms to either expand or reduce the number of search results.

"Consider AND, OR, NOT" from "Choosing & Using Sources: A Guide to Academic Research" by Teaching & Learning, Ohio State University Libraries is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Boolean "AND"

Use the AND operator to combine keywords and phrases for fewer but more focused and useful search results.
Example: typing vegetarian AND vegan in the search bar will retrieve search results where both vegetarian and vegan must be present.
 

Boolean "OR"

Use the OR operator to include words or phrases with similar meaning, ensuring that your search results don’t exclude useful information.
Example: typing vegetarian OR vegan in the search bar will retrieve search results where either vegetarian or vegan is present.
 

Boolean "NOT"

Use the NOT operator to exclude words or phrases from your search and filter out search results that may not be useful.
Example: typing vegetarian NOT vegan in the search bar will retrieve search results where vegetarian is present but vegan is excluded.