Search skills and strategies

Using your concept map, you can combine keywords to create searches to use in databases and other information sources.

• Use AND to combine different keywords and concepts - eg graffiti AND crime AND Australia
• Use OR to search for multiple synonyms at once - eg graffiti OR vandalism OR deface
• Phrase searching - put quotation marks around a phrase or title to search those words in the order they appear - eg "violent crimes"
• Truncation (*) - for alternative endings - eg Australi* to search Australia, Australian, Australians, Australiana.
  • Note: consider truncation choices carefully - eg trans* will search trans and transgender but will also search for transport, translation, and transnational.
• Wildcards (?) - for alternative spellings - eg coloni?ation will retrieve results for colonisation and colonization, colo?r will return both color and colour.
• Add brackets to combine groups of concepts and keyword variations - eg (graffiti OR vandal* OR deface) AND ("violent crimes" OR violence OR assault) AND ("zero tolerance" OR "anti-social behavio?r")

There will never be one perfect combination of keywords and phrases for your topic.

Keep adapting and exploring new combinations as you learn more about your topic from different sources. Consider keeping notes of your search strings, the databases you have searched in and the number of results to help you refine your searches over time.

There are circumstances in which Google tools - particularly Google Advanced Search and Google Scholar, can potentially be useful in searching for sources. The following video provides some guidance.