ENGL 2201: Setting Up a Successful Search

Setting up a successful first search

Every first search is an educated guess about what search terms will best connect you with the articles and books you need.  

Before you begin, think about the concepts that will need to be present in the articles and books you need.  For example, if I am interested in environmental justice issues related to city planning and sustainability, I will definitely want to include the concepts of "environmental justice, "city planning," and "sustainability" in my search for information.  Our three concepts would be:

Now that we know what concepts we want to search, we need to think about other terms authors may be using to describe those same concepts.  If authors are using different language to describe the concepts, we may not see their articles or books in our search results.  Let’s list out some synonyms and related terms below our concepts.

Now we can combine our search terms with Boolean Operators to construct our first search:

"environmental justice" AND ("city planning" OR "urban planning") AND sustainability

If we searched for information using that string of search terms, our search results would show every article and book that references "environmental justice" and sustainability and either "city planning" or "urban planning." 

Build a Sample Search String

Now copy and paste the above Search Strategy into a database search box!

*The Search Strategy Builder was developed by the University of Arizona Libraries(CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US).