Now that you considered what keywords to use and where to search for sources, it’s the right time to consider how best to conduct your search.For most comprehensive searches in the social sciences:
Using a structured search approach – a search that flows logically through each step towards a predetermined goal – allows you to build a search that is easy to edit and refine, easy to interpret, and easy to reproduce.
The following example from the education database ERIC demonstrates a search that follows a clear strategy from step 1 at the bottom of the figure to step 4 where all concept keywords are combined into a final set of results.
Results: A list of documents with overlapping descriptions/topic
The Boolean NOT operator can be used to help you understand the impact of your search decisions on your search results. You might choose to use the NOT operator if:
For a demonstration, check out the following video created by U of T’s health science library team. You’ll need to make some adjustments for your social science database, but the explanation of how this works is very helpful.
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