When you're searching for information to support an assignment or other piece of research, the one thing you shouldn't do is just sit down at the computer and start putting things into a database or search engine in the hope that something relevant comes up.
You need to know what you want, even if you're not sure where you can find it.
What's your assignment title/ research topic and what keywords can you immediately identify from that title that you can search for?
e.g. Healthcare students' experience of placements.
Don't stop there! These are not the only terms you should think to search for. Look at the words. What other keywords could you use that convey the same concepts?
Healthcare is a broad term so you may find that articles written on this subject look at specific disciplines e.g. nursing, radiography, occupational therapy - these articles are still valid as they do explore the experience of (some) healthcare students in relation to placements. Just because the word 'healthcare' isn't used doesn't mean those articles aren't relevant and shouldn't be used.
Also, healthcare is one of those words that can be written as one word/ with a space/ hyphenated so bear that in mind when you're searching.
Experience can be referred to as attitude or satisfaction or perception depending on the author of the article.
Placements can be referred to as clinical placements, student placement, practice placement
Don't start searching yet!
Now you have to think of any limits you want to apply:
Don't start searching yet!
Now you have to think of the databases that you want to search for your subject.
- if you're primarily looking for health or management related articles then Library Plus is a good place to start
- if you prefer to search databases one at a time then you can go to the Nursing Library Guide, click on the Finding Resources Online tab, and then the Databases tab to get to links to some of the core databases
- if you're also looking for books (print or eBooks) then you can search the Library Catalogue to see what we have
You're nearly there!
Final step is to decide how your search is going to work in practice. Let's use the example at the top where we're looking for Healthcare students' experience of placements
So we've already separated out our key terms and their variations:
Healthcare / radiography / nursing / occupational therapy
Students
Experience / perception / satisfaction / attitude
Placement / clinical placement / practice placement
What we're not going to do is just put all of those terms into our advanced search screens and click on search. Because we have multiple terms to look for, with a number of variations for three of those terms, we need to do our searches separately then combine them together.
For example:
Search 1 would be: Healthcare OR radiography OR nursing OR "occupational therapy" <-- I've used speech marks here to tell the database it's a phrase I want it to look for
Search 2 (a brand new search) would be: Students
Search 3 would be: Experience OR perception OR satisfaction OR attitude
Search 4 would be: Placement OR "clinical placement" OR "practice placement"
It's only once I've got those four separate sets of results that I combine them together which will (a) narrow down my results, giving me fewer to read through, and (b) ensure that more relevant ones are near the top of my results list
To combine them you would do: S1 AND S2 AND S3 AND S4 --> which is essentially telling the database to take the results of all those separate searches, combine them together, and give you a new set of results where only those terms appear together, not by themselves. You should get a lot less results. Remember! OR means MORE
Now, when you're combining your searches in a database like Library Plus, you'll only have to tick the boxes next to the completed searches you want to add together and then click on the AND button as Library Plus--and indeed most databases--guide you through the search process without making you put everything in yourself (see the Library Plus Advanced Search tab for more). If, however, you're doing an advanced search on a search engine like Google Scholar you'll have to type in the ANDs and ORs yourself (and a bit more besides - see the Google Advanced Search tab for more details)
You can start your search now!