A search strategy
is an organized plan for gathering information. Developing a search strategy
will help you locate the appropriate information from a variety of sources.
You should always bear in mind that you will probably need to conduct
several searches before finding information you find useful.
This occurs for a couple of reasons.
- When you conduct a search you are looking at materials
that have been compiled from a wide variety of sources and organized
in many different ways. Many resources have been indexed and catalogued
by librarians and other information professionals. In this indexing
and cataloguing process these professionals must always use the same
subject term to describe a subject. For example, they may use the term
"automobile" for "car" or "motor vehicle".
Terminology may be different from those you might utilize to conduct
a search. The terminology also may vary from database to database as
they are indexed by different indexers with different rules. To complicate
matters even more, resources are often about more than one subject and
a cataloguer must choose a primary subject and again his or her idea
of what a resource is about may be different from yours. You create
a search strategy so that you have the best chance of locating the items
you want.
- Often you don't know exactly what you are looking
for before commencing your search. If you don't know what you want
it is hard to find useful information. A search strategy helps you answer
this question.
It may be helpful to view your search strategy as two
different but interconnecting components. The first is the more theoretical
development of your topic and the second is the more physical search for
and evaluation of information that allows you to develop your ideas.
For a research paper or speech, the following is a useful
search strategy:
next - Developing A Topic |
