Four steps to a better search

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Step 1: Choose good search/subject terms

Keywords, also known as subject terms, are already present in the choice of research area and the choice of the assignment's title.

You can find more keywords in:

– articles, books written by researchers working in the field.

– dictionaries, article databases, reports, books, encyclopedia etc.

Find synonyms, related keywords, broader or narrower keywords and possible abbreviations for keywords

Show Hint 1

Some bibliographic article databases have an online Thesaurus (synonyms)

Show Hint 2

Use both English and Latin names for plants and animals

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Step 2: How to use: OR – AND & NOT

You have chosen subject/keywords and which article databases you want to search in. Now you need to use: AND, OR and NOT

You must now combine all the related keywords you have found, in order to get a broad, comprehensive search.

An example of a title: “Overweight among Danish women”

• Search 1: woman OR women OR female OR females
• Search 2: Overweight OR obesity
• Search 3: Danish OR Denmark

Then all three searches are combined with AND to narrow the search:

You can use NOT to exclude keywords.
You can limit by, for example, publication year and language, if there are too many sources.

Show Hint

Truncation / Wildcards are used to search for word stems and all derived forms of a word, e.g. singular and plural. The truncation symbol (wildcard) is often an asterisk (*, replaces 0 to many characters) and sometimes a question mark (?) or a dollar sign ($)

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Step 3: Find relevant bibliography article databases

It is fine to search in Google, or even better Google Scholar, when you search. But if you really want to optimise, and have control and an overview of your search, you should search in the article databases – also called bibliographic databases:

“A bibliographic database is a database of bibliographic records, an organized digital collection of references to published literature, including journal and newspaper articles, conference proceedings, reports, government and legal publications, patents, books, etc.”
A bibliographic database may be general in scope or cover a specific academic discipline”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliographic_database

Københavns Universitetsbibliotek gives you, as a student, access to many different article databases.

Always search in more than one article database. Since they all have unique sources – and you do want to include everything 🙂

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Step 4: Evaluate the search result and be critical

Now that you have found these different sources; articles, books, reports and so on – it is important that you look at them critically.

Now you need to examine whether the sources are reliable or unreliable. You can do this by considering whether the source is objective, relevant, reliable and/or accurate?

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Step 5: Københavns Universitetsbibliotek

You are always welcome to contact Københavns Universitetsbibliotek