Wednesday, 1 April 2009

Search Tips - Search strategy

Once you have identified the resources you think may be appropriate you should then analyse your topic and note down any keywords you can use in your search.

  • Consider synonyms/realted terms - eg shoes, footwear
  • Consider acronyms and abbreviations - eg EU/ European Union
  • Conside different spellings - eg globalisation/globalization
When entering your search term improve your chances of finding useful and relevant information by

  • Combining search term using AND/OR/NOT
  • Using truncation to find all forms of that word, for example manag* will retrieve results for all forms of the word such as manager,managment, managing etc
  • Replacing one or more letters of a word with a wildcard (symbol) in order to retrieve all versions of that word, for example wom*n would find woman/women - this is useful for when american spellings

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