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Data Science: Plan Your Search

This guide will help Data Science students find information they can use for their studies

Sample assignment topic

 

Create a digital visualisation on the rise in construction of oil or gas pipelines in the last 10 years in Central Asia. 

Map of pipelines in Centrl Asia
Image: U.S. Energy Information Administration. (n.d.). Oil and gas pipelines in Central Asia. Mapping Cultural Space Across  Eurasia. https://eurasia.omeka.fas.harvard.edu/items/show/963

Identify your key concepts

 

Before you begin searching, it's a good idea to identify the main ideas (or keywords) in your assignment question.

Our sample question asks us to create a data visualisation representing the growth in oil and gas pipeline building over the last 10 years in Central Asia. 

Despite the fact that the sample question is short, it contains many elements:

  • data visualisation
  • growth
  • oil and gas pipelines
  • Central Asia
  • the last 10 years.

To find information for this assignment we will need to find data on oil and gas pipelines that have been built in Central Asia (and the world more generally) in the last 10 years, as well as some information on the oil and gas industry in Central Asia more generally. We will then have to turn that information into a data visualisation.  

Let's begin by creating a search for data about oil and gas pipeline production. For this we then need to concentrate on:

growth Oil / Gas pipelines Central Asia

Keywords and Synonyms

Before searching in earnest, it's also good to do some background reading and map out some additional terms to search with. Wikipedia and (where permitted) GenAI are great for brainstorming, but in this specific instance the CIA World Fact Book (linked below) might be also be useful for country-level data.

After doing a little background seraching, we can add some similar and related terms to our table. 

growth Oil & Gas pipelines Central Asia

construction

building

natural gas

Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline

 

Tajikistan

Turkmenistan

Kazakhstan

Kyrgyzstan

Uzbekistan

Build your search

Build your search

 

When searching, it's best to start simple. For our topic that would probably be oil pipeline Central Asia

If you find lots of material try adding a keyword, eg: oil pipeline construction Central Asia

If you don't find much, you can try searching with Boolean Operators. Boolean Operators can be used to search for many similar or related terms at once. The idea behind this is to find more material, and also to save you time in having to run many different searches. The box below will explain how.

Boolean searches for our topic

 
  • Use OR to add similar and related terms to a search.
  • Use parentheses ( ) to group terms connected with OR together, eg: 
    (gas OR oil)
  • Use AND to combine sets of related terms
    (gas OR oil) AND pipeline 
  • If you have keywords that are two words or longer enclose them in double quotes, eg: "central Asia" 

Full search example: 

(construction OR growth OR build) AND (gas OR oil) AND pipeline AND ("Central Asia" OR Kazakhstan OR Kyrgyzstan OR Tajikistan OR Turkmenistan OR Uzbekistan)

The example below was found with this Boolean syntax in Google Scholar:

Central Asian Gas: prospects for hte 2020's - aricle found in Google Scholar