Select a Topic
Start by selecting a topic that meets assignment requirements:
- Read the assignment carefully and follow directions.
- How long is your paper?
- What types of sources are required, and how many?
To find sources, we need a search strategy - a plan for what keywords to search and where to find information.
Create a Search Strategy
Identify 2-3 major concepts.
What concepts are most important? If you add too may keywords to the search, you will not get good results. If you only have one major topic, your research question may be too broad. If you have four or more major concepts, your research question may be too narrow.
Come up with synonyms and related ideas for each major concept.
Sometimes the first word you think of for a major concept isn't the best keyword to search. For example, searching for "student-parent" gives mostly results about parents of schoolchildren, not about students who are also parents. A search for "parenting students" will give better results. Avoid vague words or those that could have different meanings.
- student parents -- parenting students, family responsibilities, students with children
- study space -- distraction, workspace, study environment, noise
Combine one keyword from each group using AND:
Different combinations of keywords will give different results. Try several different search strategies to see which give the best results.
- parenting students AND distraction
- family AND study space
- student parents AND workspace
Search Strategies for Common Topics
Gen Z
- Try: "Gen Z", keywords about specific problems Gen Z students have.
- Avoid: "Generation Z" [gives more scholarly articles but fewer newspapers and magazines]
First-Generation College Students
- Try: "first generation students", "first generation college", "academic preparedness", "impostor syndrome", "study skills", "support system".
- Avoid using [first generation] without [college] or [student] as a keyword because this gives results about first generation immigrants and other "first generations".
Multitasking
- Try: mutlitasking, switching costs, deep work.
- Avoid general keywords like productivity, efficiency or cognition. While they are all related to the topic, they are too general.
Community College Students (Work-Life Balance)
- Try: "community college students", "working students", "work-life balance", "work-study-life balance".
- Avoid: community college students [without quotation marks].
Time Management
- Try: "time management", self-discipline.
- Avoid: time management [without quotation marks], scheduling [gives results about scheduling classes].
Sleep
- Try: sleep hygiene, sleep schedule, sleep debt, microsleep, caffeine, screentime, sleep deprivation, circadian rhythm, sleep routine, sleep cycle.
- Avoid: "sleep disorder" [This gives results on medical conditions. Many college students experience poor sleep, but those who experience sleep disorders should seek medical help.]
Underprepared Students
- Try: first-year students, college readiness, college success, study skills.
Adjusting Your Search Strategy
Now you have some search strategies to try when searching for books and articles. You will not know which search strategies are best until you start searching. Pay attention to the number and relevance of results you get. A good search strategy should give you a small number of highly-relevant results.
Number of Results
Aim for around 50-500 results. If you get fewer, the search may be too specific. If you get more, the search may be too broad.
These are real examples from Academic Search Complete, limited to full-text articles from the past ten years. Imagine sorting through the results for each search. Which search strategy would you try first?
| Search | Results |
| sleep | 33,770 |
| sleep AND college students | 625 |
| sleep hygiene AND college students | 58 |
| sleep hygiene AND college students AND sleep cycle | 1 |
[sleep hygiene AND college students] is the best search to try first. It will give results that focus on solutions to sleep problems for college students, but it is not so specific that you would get too few results.
Relevance
Once your number of results is reasonable, you can scan the first page of results to see if they are relevant to your project. Do you see results that will be useful? If not, try adjusting the keywords in your search strategy. If you find relevant results, pay attention to the words they use. Those might be good keywords to try in new searches. For example, if you see the phrase "sleep hygiene" in several articles, that might be a good word to try in a search.