The Little Book of Literature Searching

Library Academic Support

Helping you get the best from the Library, its collections, resources and services

A brief introduction to potentially useful steps towards success in finding relevant academic literature

Assembled in preparation for library sessions for the nursing students of University of Edinburgh’s School of Health in Social Science but applicable to any topic.

Rowena Stewart,
Academic Support Librarian,
University of Edinburgh
9th September 2020

Contents

Page 1 - Search concepts
Page 2 - Research question
Page 3 - Search terms
Page 4 - Search terms table
Page 5 - What search terms to use
Page 6 - Boolean operators
Page 7 - OR
Page 8 - AND
Page 9 - Truncation symbol
Page 10 - Truncation symbol example
Page 11 - Search History
Page 12 - Keeping results
Page 13 - Abstracting & Indexing databases by subject
Page 14 - Subject headings

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1

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To find relevant academic literature on a topic it can help to think what would make you decide to use something you had found.

What words or phrases appearing in a piece of writing, or a summary of one, would indicate it was relevant to your topic?

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2

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Sometimes putting your research topic into the form of a question can help.

For example:

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How useful is mindfulness for students experiencing exam stress?

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3

Whether or not you have made a research question of your topic, what are its main concepts?

What synonyms for those concepts can you think of?

Are there similar concepts which could be relevant?

These words and phrases become your "search terms"

4

It may help to tabulate what you come up with, as here:

5

You do not have to use all the words you come up.

Having them in reserve gives you options, if the search terms you first think of do not work as well as you expected.

6

Boolean Operators

The common commands used to connect search terms in the way which relates to your topic are:

OR

AND

7

Use OR to connect synonyms and similar concepts.

OR widens the search and retrieves more results.