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Health Studies

Search Strategy and Tips

  • Conceive: What is the assignment? What will your topic be?
  • Organize: What are you looking for? Historical information, current information, statistical data, peer reviewed article?
  • Keywords: Break your topic down into keywords or concepts.  Once you have keywords, find synonyms for those words and phrases. How can you combine them?
  • Start Broad: Start your searching with one or two keywords (broad topic) and narrow your search as you go with additional terms, altering what years of publication you’re looking for, only looking at peer reviewed articles, etc.
  • Analyze: Scan the results of your search to see what kind of articles you’re getting with your searches. If you’re finding good articles, look at those articles keywords and subject headings that were used in their records – these will help as you continue your search.
    • If you are not finding anything exact, find something close and try those keywords and subjects
  • Reassess: If you are not getting the results you are looking for, you may need to change your searches, broaden or narrow your topic, or change your topic.  Ask for help if you are not sure what your best option is.
  • Restart: Research is a cyclical process, you may need to start from scratch or just from an earlier step like choosing new keywords.

If your topic is: 

What is the effect of flu shots on the general population?

 1. Identify keywords or phrases:       

    flu shots    population    vaccines

 2. Explore synonyms for your keywords/phrases:

    flu shots: immunizations, vaccinations

    population: community, public 

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: 

Vaccin* will search for vaccine, vaccines, vaccinate, vaccination, vaccinations, etc. 

You will get more search results if you truncate!

Once you have collected some articles, take a closer look at them.

Read and review what you have. Do you have enough information to support your topic?

If you do not like what you have or you do not have enough good information, go back to your search. Try some new keywords or a different database.

Explore some of the subject headings from the articles that you do want to use.

If some of your articles have bibliographies you might want to look at some of the sources listed in those bibliographies.

If you are stuck -- ask a librarian for help.