Developing A Search Strategy

Basic Search Strategies

Now that you have developed a table of keywords and their synonyms, you can start using them in a search strategy using basic search strategies, search connectors, search operators and to make effective search strings. Here are some examples using our assessment question:

Using AND/OR:

Managment styles AND Manufacturing AND Australia

Using nesting:

(Manage* OR leadership*) AND (Manufact* OR factory OR "production line") AND effective AND ("Australia" or NSW or Victoria or Queensland or Melbourne or Sydney)

The truncation symbol (usually an asterisk *) finds any word with the same first part of the word - e.g. manage* will search for manage, manageing, management etc...
Use “quotation marks” to search for an exact phrase, e.g. "Production line" this will only retrieve hits with the exact phrase "production line", but not "Production" or "line" by itself.

The next tab will show you how to effectively use these search strings in a database.

Using Your Search String - Searching Databases

We will now show you how to use the search strings we develop in academic databases to find more books, journal articles, and conference papers.

The two videos below will show you how to search ProQuest and Scopus.

ProQuest combines full-text articles with detailed indexing of global literature on natural sciences, engineering and technology.

Scopus is a comprehensive abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature.

If you are finding a lot of irrelevant results, here are some actions you can take:

Try using different keywords
Try a more basic search
Use MIT's business and IT specific databases