Systems Design Engineering: Search Tips

The Library Catalogue indexs books, journals, articles, magazines, maps, data, etc. You can use it as a starting point for your research, to determine what kinds of information are published about your topic. 

To find the Library Catalogue, head to the Library Homepage. The catalogue is accessible right from the homepage. To have more control over your search, use the Advanced Search option. 

Let's say you want to research the relationship between biometric devices and how they help dispel identity theft in the field of healthcare. The first step you'll take it to identify your main concepts, in this case: biometric, identify theft, and healthcare. 

For each one of your concepts, spend some time brainstorming synonyms. For example, you could write healthcare as: "health care", healthcare, medical, hospital, etc. 

Once you have a strong list of concepts and synonyms, use Boolean Operators to connect them. You can learn more about Boolean Operators, and other search tactics, here.

Your resulting search strategy might look like this: 

biometr* AND ("health care" OR healthcare OR medical) AND (security OR fraud OR identity) 

Let's say you're specifically looking for articles on this topic. You can use the Articles + tab of the Library Catalogue to search for articles found online.

In order to narrow down your results, use the Refine My Results tab down the left side of the page and choose to narrow by Subject. Here you can reinforce the concepts "biometry" and "biometrics". 

Review your search results. Based on the number of articles retrieved and the wide range of article titles you can see that there's already been a good amount of research done on this topic. Now you can refine your search using a few different tactics: 

• When you discover a useful looking reference, examine the words used in the title and abstract of the reference and add any more relevant words to your list of concepts 
• When you find a relevant result, examine the index terms/subject headings/descriptors to find better or alternative words for your concept
• Go back and redo your previous searches to try each of the new keywords you've found
• Try the same process in a different database. The Library Catalogue is just a starting point. Try inputting your search into one of the database from the Find Articles tab of this guide. 

Need more information on how to construct a search in a database? Check out the Quick Tips and Shortcuts for Database Searching video found on the Online Tutorials page to learn transferable searching skills.