Advanced Research Skills

This guide will help you find high quality information for your homework, assignments or coursework. It will help you to think about where to look, how to search, how to deal with the results and how to evaluate the

quality of what you find.

Effective Planning – What to Look For and Where to Look For It Before you embark on any sort of research you should plan what you’ll do. Planning is very important – it gives structure to your research, saves you time and helps avoid missing out on really useful information.

The first part of your plan should outline what, exactly, you are going to search for. Which keywords and

terms are you going to use? Pick out keywords from your assignment title or topic. Think about synonyms (words which mean the same thing) and related words. You could miss out on some helpful information just because you didn’t search with the same word an author used. Combine keywords and use Boolean connecting words – see below for Different Searching Techniques. Make a list of each search you want to

carry out. Be prepared for this to grow as you learn more about the topic.

The second part of your plan should outline which resources you are going to search. Think about the Library Online Catalogue for books and journal articles in the Library, Your Online Resources for

information not freely available on the internet and The Library Also Recommends… sites. These have already been judged as high quality so try these first before conducting general internet searches. Make

sure you try all your search combinations in each resource and note whether each search was useful.

Different Searching Techniques (Boolean Searching) Boolean search techniques allow you to combine search terms and search with them in different ways to

help reduce the number of searches you have to do and to help you find the most relevant results quickly.

Separate your search terms/keywords with the word ‘and’, e.g. Theresa May and general election and 2017. You are telling the search engine you want results that include all of those terms, but they don’t have to be next to each other.

Putting speech marks around a phrase, e.g. “social media”, tells the search engine that you want results that include those words next to each other.

If a search term could have multiple endings, e.g. child / children / childhood / childcare / children’s, enter the root of the term then put an asterix at the end, e.g. child*. You are telling the search engine to look for all the possible variations at the same time. This means you don’t have to do each one yourself!

How Search Engines Work As you know, if you type in your assignment/topic title it’s very unlikely you’ll get matching results. Typing in random words doesn’t work well either as different search engines look at what you type

in different ways. The best method is to use Boolean searching – a standardised format that all

search engines recognise.

Refining Your Results If your results don’t seem to be relevant, check to

see how they are ordered. Are they by most relevant or by most recent? Often, you should be able to change the order. Similarly, you may be able to filter the results by date or the type of

source. Some resources also let you search within the item you have found.

Can I Use the Internet? So much information is available online that it can be an equally valuable source. However, you will have to deal with far more results from your searches and you will have to judge the quality of the information you

use. Using low quality, unreliable information in your work can seriously affect your grades.

WHERE TO FIND HELP If you are struggling to find relevant results, use your resources, or just don’t know how to start,

Mrs Chávez can help. Email, drop in or book a one-to-one session.

Tips for Searching the Internet You can hone in on reliable, pee-reviewed documents by using Google Scholar. Look out for those with PDF links as these will be available for free.

If you put a minus sign in front of a search term in Google, e.g. virus and –software, it will ignore any information about your topic that is associated with that term.

Use the term site to search within specific websites. For example, you can specify a particular website, e.g. Olympics site:bbc.co.uk or you can ask it to search within academic/university sites, e.g. Olympics site:ac.uk.

Most internet search engines have an Advanced Search option. In Google, conduct your search then click on Settings. Here you can add criteria, such as which country the information comes from, when the site was last updated and where it looks for your search terms.

Even without using Google’s Advanced Search you can refine your results by clicking Tools after your search and then choosing UK only sites or when the site was last updated.

Try different search engines if you are not getting enough useful information. Each search engine, e.g. Google or Bing, doesn’t list everything available on the internet, only those sites included in their own index.

How to Judge the Quality of What You Find The quickest and easiest way is to use the four W’s technique. You will get better at it the more you do it.

Who Who wrote the

information? Do they have a reliable background in the subject? Look at their ‘About Us’ page if required.

Why Why was the information

written? Does it have a bias? Was it

produced to be informative,

persuasive or argumentative?

When When was the

information published? Look for the copyright year at the bottom of

the page if no date is given. Is it still

up-to-date?

Where Where has the

information come from? Is a UK-

based site or from another country?

Keeping Track Of Your Research Check that you have tried all your search

combinations in all your selected resources. Are there any new topics/keywords you need to

research? If you have to reference remember to make a note of all the information you need for

your references.