Section outline
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Effective Search Strategies
According to the University of Leeds, "A search strategy is an organised structure of key terms used to search a database. The search strategy combines the key concepts of your search question to retrieve accurate results". Planning your search
- Define your research topic or research question
- Choose a topic you find interesting
- Identify important concepts for your topic / question
- Define any limiting factors e.g. publication date, age group, English language
- Decide where to search by evaluating your resources
(Robertson, 2019)
Build
- Choose your Keywords
- Keywords are the words that describe your topic of research. These can be individual words or a phrase. These keywords can be chosen from the sentence you create to define your research topic. Once you choose the significant words, you can then come up with synonyms, or words with similar meanings. All of these can be keywords to use in forming your search.
(Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia, n.d.)
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You can use a number of different search strategies to help you find the information you need. The most popular are Boolean Operators, Phrases, Truncation, and Wildcards.
Boolean operators are used to connect your search terms and enable you to broaden, narrow, and exclude specific terms in your search.
AND: Use AND to narrow your search by combining your terms so that each search result contains all of the terms. For example, management AND leadership will retrieve results with both terms.
OR: Use OR to broaden your search by combining search terms so that each result contains at least one of the terms. For example: “human resource management” OR "human resources" OR "HR management" finds results that contain any of these terms.
NOT: You can use NOT to exclude any terms so that each result does not include that term. For example, “human resource management” NOT "HR management" finds results that contains the term "human resource management" but not the term "HR management".
(OpenAI, 2026)
For example:
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Natural language: How does social media affect university students’ academic performance?
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Keywords: social media AND academic performance AND university students
Review your results
Check if your articles are:
- Relevant to your topic and discipline
- Peer-reviewed
- Published in the last 5 years
- Check if the information provided is truthful, trustworthy and reliable
Adjust your strategy
Too few articles? Try...
- Brainstorming more/better alternative search terms
- Deleting the least relevant term from your search (if you have multiple terms)
- Using the wildcard*
Too many articles? Try...
- More keywords (example: focus on a country/region, time periods, or group of people)
Manage your results
Add your results to a folder, for you to access later by downloading it or creating a project folder on the EBSCO Discovery Service.
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A scholarly source is an article or book that was written by an expert in the academic field. Most are written by researchers and subject-matter experts. Because of the careful peer review process, scholarly, peer-reviewed articles are generally considered very valid sources of information.
The EBSCO Discovery Database is an all-inclusive search solution that makes in-depth research easy. The platform offers sophisticated features that anticipate user intent, helping you get to exactly what you are looking for quickly and easily. The EDS is available to all students enrolled with New Bridge via the MyNGI VLE.
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