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Key resources

Search strategies

Library Search is a good place to start if you are new to your topic. You will be able to find relevant books and videos in our collection, as well as scholarly journal articles and news resources. 

Searching within a database for a particular discipline area will find research more targeted and relevant to your subject. Some general tips for database searching are:

  • Look beyond the first page of results (usually organised by date order)
  • Use more than one – different databases will give you different results
  • Use journal titles to help evaluate the relevance of an article

When you identify your keywords and phrases try to think of alternative words/phrases.  For example, television or TV or broadcasting. Also consider spelling variations (American and British) e.g. organization or organisation, globalisation or globalization.

Choose a variety of search terms and experiment with different combinations until the results are relevant to your topic.

  • Use quotation marks for phrases:  “second language” will find all records containing these words as a phrase

  • Use OR to combine synonyms or related terms:  instruction OR teaching will find all records containing either of these words

  • Use AND to combine different keywords:  multicultural AND inclusion will find all records containing these words anywhere 
     

  • Use NOT to exclude words:  education NOT online will find records on education but not those that are talking about online education

  • A truncation symbol * finds alternate endings of words:  Austral*  will find Australia, Australian, Australiana

  • Use wildcards to compensate for different spellings:  wom?n  will retrieve women and woman   globali?ation  will retrieve globalisation and globalization

Symbols used for wildcards and truncation may vary, so use the help guide in each database to find out what is correct.

Many databases use a system of standardised subject terms (sometimes called descriptors or subject headings). Using these terms can help you find information you may otherwise have missed.

When you find a useful reference on a database, look at the full record for that reference to see if there are any descriptors or subject headings in the record. Searching by those terms may yield useful results.

Some databases include a thesaurus - this can be a useful place to ensure that you are using the most appropriate subject headings, and they often include notes which help you to understand the scope of the term.

Keyword searching can sometimes be difficult because the English language is rich in synonyms and there are many narrower or broader terms which might also be relevant. Citation searching or chaining is an alternative way of discovering resources.

Start with an article that is highly relevant to your research. Ask your lecturer or tutor for advice on this if you’re not sure. You can find related articles and resources either forwards or backwards in time from this key reference:

  • Backward chaining: check the article's bibliography or reference list to find citations of previously published resources referred to in this article. These will be older than your key reference.
  • Forward chaining: to discover more recently published resources which refer to this article, check the cited by or citations function if available, or look up the reference in Scopus, Web of Science or Google Scholar. These will be newer than your key reference.

It is important to keep up to date with new publications in your field.

Many databases allow you to set up alerts so you can store your searches on the database and have it run automatically at set intervals, with the results emailed to you.

You can also set up alerts from many journal websites to receive table of contents lists of new issues and publisher websites to receive new book notifications.

Check if a journal is peer reviewed

You can tell if a journal is peer reviewed, scholarly, trade or popular by looking it up in the Ulrichsweb platform that the library subscribes to:

Journals

Find examples of journals in the table below.  Many others can be found via Library Search.  Use the journals tab to search for topics such as "applied linguistics" or "modern language".  

Databases

Find more databases