1. Get Organized. Research can be time consuming so take a few minutes to get organized and think about what you are looking for. Do you need current or historical information, statistical data or facts?
2. Break your topic down into keywords or concepts. Think about possible synonyms for those words and phrases. Many searches may work with a single key concept, but you will often have two or more.
3. Start broadly and narrow down as you go. Your first searches will give you a feel for what kind of information is available.
4. Scan the results of your search to see what kind of articles you retrieved. If you see a good article, look for additional keywords or even subject headings which have been attached to the article. Try those in your search.
5. Be flexible. You may need to broaden or narrow your search depending on the amount and kind of information you find.
If your thesis statement is: The history of mystery plays in England
1. Identify keywords or phrases: mystery plays England
2. Explore synonyms for your keywords/phrases
"mystery plays" or "miracle plays" or "cycle plays"
England or Great Britain or UK or United Kingdom
Tip! Remember that keywords can appear anywhere in a record so they may not always get you to the information you need.
What is truncation? Truncation is removing the end of a word and replacing it with a symbol. So why would you do that? Because it will search multiple versions of a single word without you having to type them all in.
To truncate a search term, do a keyword search in a database but add an asterisk (*) to the end of the word after you've cut off part of it. Confused? See the example below.
For example:
Myst* will search for Mystery, Mysteries, Mysterious, Mysteriously, etc.
(Be careful, you might also get results for words like mystic, mystical etc.)