Planning Your Search Strategy
You have defined your research topic, and now you are
ready to search for books, journal articles, and other research materials.
NOT SO
FAST
Before you go running to the library catalogue, the CD-ROM stations,
or the web browser, take a little time to develop a search strategy.
Questions to ask yourself:
What type of information do
I need?
Thinking about the type of information you need before you start searching
will help you determine where and how you will look for that information.
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Do you need scholarly information, or will information written for the
general public suffice?
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Do you need government documents, statistics, maps, newspaper articles,
primary sources, or other types of specialized information?
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Does your topic have a telecommunications angle?
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Does the information have to be current or from a particular time period?
Often, the most cutting edge, up-to-date information is found in journal
articles. If you are looking for information published within a particular
time period, most databases will allow you to limit you search by date
or date range.
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Do you need the broad treatment that a book might give to a subject, or
are you interested in journal articles that deal with a specific aspect
of a subject? (You may need both.)
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Into what discipline does your topic fall? Is it interdisciplinary?
This is particularly important when you want to search for journal
articles. The discipline(s) will determine what database(s) you use.
How much information do I need?
Do you need everything that has ever been written on the subject, or will
a few carefully chosen books and/or articles suffice?
What are the key concepts of
my topic?
You will need to identify these concepts in order to search for information
about your topic.
eg.
If your research question is "How is telecommunications privitization
affecting competition in Australai?" your key concepts would be "telecommunications
privitization," "competition," and "Australia." When you search a database
for information on this topic, you must somehow tell the database to search
ONLY for records that contain all three of these concepts. To do this,
you might have to build a search statement using Boolean operators, which
are explained on the next page of this chapter.
What subject terms (sometimes
called descriptors) does the library catalog or journal index/abstract
that I am using use to describe the key concepts of my topic?
Library catalogs and journal indexes/abstracts use one subject heading
or descriptor to describe a specific concept. This ensures that everything
about a particular concept is grouped under the subject heading that describes
that concept.
You can determine the correct subject heading to use by checking
the list of subject headings or thesaurus associated with a particular
database, if there is one, or by doing a title keyword search and then
using subject headings in relevant records to revise your search. Both
these approaches are discussed in greater detail later in this chapter.