Practising your search skills
These activities follow on from the video tutorial, which you should watch first.
https://v3.pebblepad.co.uk/v3portfolio/cumbria/Asset/View/94jgbwp6n3t4fm9yfbtWjr7
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By the end of these activities you will have gained most of the skills necessary to perform a
high quality search for material to support your studies. The strategy here shows you how to
capture all the possible terms and related research, before filtering it down to the most
relevant articles. A good search does this systematically – casting the net as wide as possible
before filtering down.
Activity 1
Go into OneSearch , click on Everything and the Advanced Search option.
The screenshots below are taken from the old Quest search facility but you should be able
to input the suggested terms with ease using the updated OneSearch facility. As search
image below demonstrates there is a lot of published material that includes “plagiarism” in
the title.
Let’s assume for a moment that you are a student nurse. Students new to nursing are often
worried about plagiarising when first writing assignments. A typically valid question is
something along the lines of “How can I avoid plagiarism when writing about this topic
when thousands of others have written about it before me and the language used is so
similar ?”.
The Nursing Standard journal has published several articles related to plagiarism. Think
about what terms you might use (jot them down) and perform an Advanced search in Quest
to locate the most recent one you can find (Hint - the Select a Field drop down box (right of
screen in the image above) also allows you to select Journal Title).
Save this to your own computer – you might find it useful reading !
Activity 2
Let’s get a little more technical. Researchers spend a lot of time choosing their title, so that
when you think about your search terms and input them, their article will appear.
Assume you have an interest in brain injuries in children involved in accidents. You want to
start reading around the subject and decide to locate a few articles that will provide you
with up to date information.

Step 1 – 3. Casting the net widely.
Link the 4 words above with AND, perform a search using the Advanced option,
specifying that they should all appear in the Title (i.e. children AND brain AND
injuries AND accident – as shown below).
How many results do you get ?
When I performed this search I got 2 results. Do you think this represents all the
relevant research that has been done in this area ? Unlikely !

Step 2.
Now look at the titles of the articles you located and ask yourself if there are better
terms that could be used ?
An immediate one that springs to mind is that the concept of “trauma” might be
needed. There are several others you might consider, but let’s go with this as our
example for now.
Replace “accident” with “trauma” (children AND brain AND injuries AND trauma)
How does that broaden the search results ?

Step 3.
We now need to think about different ways in which a word might be used - shown
in the video by the use of the truncation symbol *
Let’s take “injuries” first. Are there other ways this word might be used ?
I can think of injured, injures, injury – all terms a researcher might use in their title
and therefore worth looking for. They all share a common beginning and I can
search for them using a well placed *.
However, what I must not do is shorten the word too much, for example inputting
inj* would locate words I don’t want (e.g inject, injection, injustice etc.). The key is
to shorten the word to give relevant derivatives without lots of unnecessary material
being located. The logical truncation here is injur*.
As well as truncating “injuries” to “injur*”, you should do the same for trauma (using
the * to capture trauma and traumatic) and children (to capture child, children etc).
Brain doesn’t need it as there are no possible words that stem from this.
Your search should look something like this.
If you have entered these properly you will immediately see the value of using the
truncation symbol – what a difference in terms of search results !

Step 4. Narrowing the search.
You will note that during this process we have gone from a couple of articles, to a
couple of dozen, to several hundred, and at this point we can be fairly confident that
we will have captured a broad range of relevant material.
However, we now need to narrow the search as we can’t be looking through all
1000+ articles.
A very useful skill is knowing how to NOT search for certain words – i.e. removing
them from the search so that we don’t pick up articles we aren’t interested in. We
can do this using the “NOT” filter (see left of image below) and indicating the terms
we don’t want.
Let’s assume I am not interested in rehabilitation, or psychiatric disturbances or
effects on behaviour. To exclude these I simply open a second box, as shown below. I
type in each of the terms I don’t want (note how I specified in the title but I could
extend this to the abstract or even the whole article), linking terms with the Boolean
operator “OR”.
I can also narrow by date and other filters, by clicking on “show more” on the left of
the search screen (see below).
This opens the boxes and I can enter my extra filters.
If I select “peer reviewed” material in the last 5 years, along with the excluded words
above I narrow the search from almost 1500 articles down to about 200.
At this point I could consider other filters, or I might choose to scan through and save
relevant ones to a folder on my computer.
A final strategy consideration
If you are new to an area and want to explore it, a good strategy is to look for review
articles – authors who have reviewed the primary research in an area and produced
a literature review or high quality systematic review (i.e. secondary research). They
will always include the term “review” in their title.
Doing this as shown above narrows my search down to just 6 articles. This means I’ll
miss lots of specialist primary research, but if my need is for an overview of a new
topic this can be a very effective strategy.
Note – there is an additional link at the bottom of this page to a document that
covers a range of search strategies including truncation. If the link doesn’t work try
Googling – lots of material available.
Don’t forget the Journal collection
The only other skill shown in the video and not practices here was accessing the Journal
collection.
Remember that this can be done via the link on the OneSearch page (shown above) and via
the University Home / Current Student page.
The search skills that you have developed using OneSearch are transferrable to other
external databases should you need them, and with these you should be well equipped to
locate high quality material to support your studies.
Remember the strategy - aim to cast the net widely, then narrow it to the most relevant
articles.
Link to enhanced search skills
http://www.library.unisa.edu.au/services/databases/wildcardsbasic.pdf