Before you start your search, brainstorm your keywords. If you just search for the words in your topic, you'll be limiting your search unnecessarily. It's almost guaranteed that some of your words have synonyms and alternate spellings; these should be keywords too.
When you are first starting your search, it is best to cast as wide of a net as possible. Using more keywords will expand your search. The less keywords you use, the more you risk missing research which uses slightly different terminology than you.
For example, you might search for the effects of bringing therapy dogs to school. But, I wrote an article about the benefits of having therapy dogs in the classroom. Unless you only use “therapy dogs” as your search term, my article won’t match your search, even though it’s exactly what you are looking for! And even if “therapy dogs” was your only search term, you still probably wouldn’t find my article, since it would likely be buried under thousands of unrelated articles that just mention “therapy dogs” and don’t talk about schools at all.
Here’s what the original search looks like:
“therapy dogs”
AND school
AND effects
Here’s what the improved search looks like:
“therapy dogs”
AND school OR classroom OR education
AND effects OR befits OR advantages OR impact
The good news is that most databases will help you out with this. Simply type “or” after your keyword and see what suggestions pop up! We’ll talk more about making the most out of AND/OR later this month.
Also, notice how “therapy dogs” is surrounded by quotation marks? This tells the database to search for those two words together as a phrase rather than as two separate words. There’s a big difference between searching for articles about therapy dogs and searching for articles about therapy and dogs.
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