Psychology: Plan your Search

Why plan your search?

At university you are expected to find and use scholarly information:

• in your assignments
• to prepare for class
• to explore new theories and ideas

However, to find scholarly information you need to search in a particular way to get good results.

Use this page to learn how to plan your search and find the best scholarly information sources to use. 

Step 1: Identify your key concepts

Before you find any information, identify the main ideas (or key concepts) in your assignment question or research topic

Example:

What are the psycholocial and health effects of shared office spaces?

The key concepts are: 

Step 2: Brainstorm keywords & synonyms

Different words can be used to describe the same concept.

Think of other words that could be used to describe your key concepts. Synonyms should also be included. 

Example:

Step 3: Build your search

Boolean Operators are a way of telling a database or search engine how to do your search. Watch the video to learn how.

Use Boolean Operators to combine your keywords & synonyms into a search. You can build multiple searches using different synonyms & keywords.

Phrase Searching should also be used when you are searching for an exact phrase or you have a keyword that is more than one word (for example: "psychological effects" or "Anna Freud"). 

To do this, simply put the phrase inside quotation marks for example, "psychological effects".

When you don't use quotation marks, the database may look for your words separately, so you end up getting lots of irrelevant results.

Example: 

Use OR to combine synonyms & similar words:

Use AND to combine your key concepts together: 

("psychological effects" OR stress OR "psychological distress" OR anxiety) AND ("shared office spaces" OR "coworking spaces" OR "shared workspaces")

Step 4: Start Searching

You will need to find different types of information during your studies. These may include: 

• Books & book chapters
• Journal articles
• Newspaper articles
• Standards & statistics
• Reports
• Grey literature

The type of information you are looking for will determine where you search, and how you search. 

Using the steps above will help you find most of these information types, but there are also other places to look.

Explore this study guide or ask a librarian to discover more. 

Step 5: Review your results

Not all the information you get from a search will be useful. A successful search will show results relevant to your topic. If your results are not relevant go back and try different keywords in your search.

Find relevant results by checking the: 

Even if your information is relevant, it might not be good quality. Check if it passes the C.R.A.P. Test before you use it.