How to Start Your Research

What this section will cover:

• Brainstorming search terms
• Subject-specific databases
• Citation mining
• Scanning an article
• Evaluating sources
• Finding diverse sources

Use the Researching a Topic Handout to help you brainstorm search terms for your own topic.

Ask yourself what type of source is more likely to have the information you need and how will I use this source?:

• News articles?
• Scholarly journal articles?
• Empirical studies?
• Data and statistics?
• Primary documents?

Deciding the most likely source will help determine which database to use. Different databases are composed of information from different types of sources.  BEAM is a method for helping you decide how you might use a source.

Ask yourself if the database you select provides full-text, or only citations and /or abstracts:

• If the database you need to use does not have full-text, use the or  buttons.
• If you have a citation, use the Citation Search Tool to locate the full-text.

Understand the scope of the database you select. Ask yourself:

• Does this database cover the subject area (discipline) I really need, or is there a better, more focused database?
• Does this database provide indexing for the date range I need?
• Will this database point me to or provide the full-text for articles written during the time period that is appropriate for my research need?

Although retrospective materials are sometimes added to databases, the actual article you need might not be available electronically, because it is too old or too new. 

Ask yourself if there are special advanced features that can improve your search results or make searching easier:

• Does this database allow me to limit my search to a specific date range, or to a particular magazine or journal?
• Does this database allow me to email, download, or export articles to my citation manager like Zotero or RefWorks?
• Are there features that can help me to generate better search terms, like the Thesaurus feature or the "Browse Subject Headings" features in some databases?

Once you have one (or more) useful article on a topic, use the references at the end of article to find more sources on your topic using our Citation Search tool.  This helps you see what was written previous to your current article, often called citing backward.

Use Google Scholar to see who has cited your article after it was published.  This helps you see what has been written after your article was published, citing forward.

 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License by Justina Elmore, University of Rochester. 

Search faster with these tips:

1. Search phrases using quotation marks " "  Example:  "to be or not to be"

2. Combine words with AND, OR, & NOT in capital letters.  Example: microcircuit OR nanocircuit"

3. Substitute * for several possible letters.  Example: Child* which will find child, children, childhood, etc.

4. Combine the three tips above for complex searching.  Example: homless* AND (health OR "health care") AND (adolesc* OR teen*)

In library databases it might look like:

In Google Scholar, you don't need the asterisk or AND, so it will look like: