A search strategy is a way of planning out our research process. When we do research, we often have to try multiple searches in order to find the information we want - a single search is unlikely to give us all the results we need. A search strategy gives us a map so we know where to look next. It helps save us time and frustration in our search when we're not finding results, or all our results are unrelated to our topic.
There are two questions we want to answer when developing our search strategy:
The first thing we need to determine is where we will search. The Internet or Google? A library search tool? Or a specific database?
Google is better for finding certain types of sources, like web pages and background information. However, library databases are better for finding published sources, especially peer-reviewed or scholarly articles.
For this assignment, you'll likely want to use a mix of both Google and library databases.
First, we need to know what words we'll use to search. Especially when we search in a library search tool or a library database, we want to make sure we're using keywords and not complete sentences.
Once you have some initial keywords, brainstorm synonyms (or words that mean the same thing) as well as narrower and broader terms. See the example Create a Search Strategy worksheet below to see what this process might look like.
