Your "search strategy" is the plan of attack you come up with before you even try to use a catalogue or a database. As you undertake your search, your strategy will evolve and change, but you need to have an idea of what you are going to look for and how you are going to look for it before you even start.
The first step is to sit down with your assignment and take a good look at the question you want to answer. Pull out all of the key terms and write them down on a blank sheet of paper.
The key words are the nouns and verbs, and any adjectives or adverbs that are necessarily linked to those nouns and verbs.
For example, in the sentence "Find three treatments for rotator-cuff injuries and discuss their relative merits, using systematic reviews and clinical trials to illustrate your conclusions" the following key terms can be found:
- Find
- Three treatments
- Rotator-cuff injuries
- Discuss
- Relative merits
- Systematic reviews
- Clinical trials
- Illustrate
- Conclusions
From there, highlight the words that are telling you to do something (the "action terms") in one colour and ignore them for the time being. If we take the above example:
- Find
- Discuss
- Illustrate
- Conclusions
The exact number of treatments you need to find could be considered part of the instructions, so you could make that first point "Find three".
This leaves you with a number of key terms that can be used to form your search strategy:
- Treatments
- Rotator-cuff injuries
- Relative merits
- Systematic reviews
- Clinical trials
Now you need to sit down with a fresh piece of paper and brain storm those key terms. What other words can you think of that are related to those terms? Are there any synonyms that might be used instead? Any antonyms which might be relevant?
Think about how the terms relate to each other. Which terms should you search for together, and which should be broken up for the search? For example, "Rotator-cuff injuries" should probably be split up, as both "rotator-cuff" and "injuries" have a number of synonyms and it would be easier to use them if the two terms weren't always linked.
Are there any terms which might make the search more difficult and should be kept out for the time being (in this example, "Relative merits" describes the kind of information you are looking for, rather than something you need to find information about). It also describes something you should be doing with this information (comparing the merits), so perhaps this term should be moved to your list of "action" words.
Now you should have a list of terms that you can use to look for information. How you use those terms depends on what search tools you are using. Is it a library catalogue? A journals database? An Internet search engine?
We'll look at each of these in future posts.
Before we leave this topic, though, I should point out that the "action terms" (the ones we are ignoring for the search) are still very important, and you should keep that list of them somewhere safe. When you have finished finding the information you need, those "action terms" will tell you what you need to do with it in order to pass the assignment. Definitely worth paying attention to.
