When it comes time to preparing for assignments, you must first pick a topic. This will often be something very specific like ‘Unequal Compensation among the US Women’s National Soccer Team.’ Although you might get lucky and find some good sources using these exact search terms, you also want to broaden your search to bring in additional supporting materials. This page outlines some basic techniques for crafting strong search terms.
Step 1 – Identifying key terms
- Start by listing keywords that best describe your topic. These may be single terms (example: media) or phrases (example: “social media”). Consider synonyms and out-dated terms as well.
- You will use these terms to craft your catalogue, database or search engine query in Step 3
Topic: Unequal Compensation among the USNWT
Research Question: What factors shape the pay disparity between the US Women’s and Men’s teams?
| Concept 1 (Population) |
Concept 2 (Intervention/Theory) |
Concept 3 (Comparison) |
Concept 4 (Outcomes/Effect/Phenomena) |
| Women who play soccer |
Factors that explain disparity |
Men who play sports |
Unequal compensation |
|
Athlete(s)
Football player(s)
Female athlete(s)
Wom?n athlete(s)
USWNT
Note: searching ‘Wom?n’ will return hits for both women and woman
|
Sexism
Patriarchy
Feminist theory
Discrimination
Gender
Stereotyp*
Note: an asterisk (*) will return results matching zero or more of any character. The above search would return results including stereotype, stereotyping, stereotypical, etc.
|
Male athlete(s)
Male soccer player(s)
USMNT
WNBA
NWHL
Note: while your paper wants to look at pay disparity in soccer, you might find other helpful research that compares men and women in other sports
|
Income gap
Disparity
Media coverage
Participation
Exposure
Barriers
Unequal
Inequality
|
Step 2 – Identifying what information is needed and where it is located
- Identify the type of sources needed to gather research for your assignment. This could include books, journals, data sets, newspaper articles, or other specialized sources.
- Use a research guide or browse the Library’s list of databases to identify where the information you need is likely to be found.
- If you are searching the Library Catalogue, the menu on the left allows you to refine your search by resources available online; peer-reviewed journals; books, book chapters; newspapers; and other web resources.
Step 3 – Creating and refining your search
- Search using the key terms you identified
- Are you result relevant are to your research question?
- Are there too few or too many results?
- Refine your search. Consider:
- Using synonyms you identified earlier.
- Enclosing phrases in quotation marks.
- Searching USWNT equal pay will return any results that include all the terms.
- Searching “USWNT equal pay” will return results where these terms appear in that exact order.
- Connecting multiple keywords with AND, OR, NOT (Boolean operators).
- Do you want articles that include the WNBA AND NBA?
- That include the WNBA OR NBA?
- That include the WNBA but NOT the NBA?
- Using truncation symbols
- Use an asterisk (*) at the end of a word (example: searching statistic* will retrieve statistics and statistical).
- Use a question mark (?) within the word (example: searching wom?n will retrieve women and woman)
- Using search filters or the advanced search function.
- Are you only interested in works that you can access online?
- Are you only interested in more recent articles?
- Are you only interested in articles written in English?
- Are you not interested in book reviews?
- Note: these filters may not always be needed, but can be especially useful if you need to sift through thousands of results
- Selecting a different database which may be better for your topic.
- Databases may be multi-disciplinary or discipline-specific and will contain different sources.
- Record useful searches for use later