In order to use UMUC Library databases to find relevant documents for your research, you'll need to create what's known as a search statement. A search statement isn't an actual sentence or sentence fragment; rather, it's a set of keywords connected by Boolean operators and formatted in a very specific way. The tips on this page will help you create effective search statements.
Once you have a research question, the next step of the research process is to identify the key concepts or main ideas from your research question. These key concepts and main ideas, usually nouns, are generally referred to as keywords. Keywords can be individual words as well as phrases that are composed of multiple words. The more specific your keywords, the better chance you will have of finding relevant sources for your research.
For example, if your research question was "What is the relationship between telecommuting and employee retention?", the key concepts are telecommuting and retention. (Note that relationship isn't a key concept of the research question since this word wouldn't have to appear in a document for the document to be useful for your research. In order to help ensure that you retrieve as many relevant documents as possible on your research topic, the keywords that you select should reflect concepts that must be mentioned in a document for the document to be relevant to your research.)The keywords that you identify will serve as the basis for your search statement.
You will not know whether your keywords will work well in a database or search engine until you are actually searching. In fact, a particular keyword may work well in one resource and poorly in another. Therefore, it is important to be flexible and to try a variety of keywords and keyword combinations if you are not getting the results you are looking for.
Once you've identified the keywords from your research question, the next step is to identify related terms for the keywords. Doing this will help to ensure that your searches are as thorough as possible and that you will not miss out on finding sources that are relevant to your topic. Because different authors may use different words to describe the same concept, you should try to think of different ways in which the concept could be expressed and use those words in your searches.
Keep in mind, though, that not all keywords will have appropriate synonyms. This is perfectly normal; there are some concepts that are only commonly expressed with certain words or phrases. Do not be concerned if you cannot come up with a synonym for each of your keywords.
Also note that the best terms to use for your searches may not be exact synonyms of your keywords; depending on your research topic, it may sometimes make sense to include terms that are broader or narrower than your original keyword. For example, if your research topic involved cars, it might make sense to include the broader term vehicles as well as terms like cars, autos, automobiles, and so forth. Or if your research topic had to do with the military, it might make sense to use the names of specific branches of the military (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, etc.) in addition to terms like military and armed forces.
Additionally, it may sometimes make sense to include antonyms of your keywords. For the research question mentioned earlier, for instance ("What is the relationship between telecommuting and employee retention?"), it would be a good idea to search for terms such as turnover. After all, some authors may approach the question from the flip side, asking what effect telecommuting has on employee turnover. So including antonyms in your search statement where appropriate will also help to ensure that your searches are comprehensive.
Finally, note that when choosing additional terms to use in your searches, you should only choose terms that are likely to actually appear in articles about your topic. For example, although information supervision is a term that is technically synonymous with knowledge management, it is not a term that is likely to appear in any article, and therefore it would not be useful in your searches
There are many ways of finding appropriate synonyms, antonyms, and related terms to use in your searches. For example, you may find such terms in dictionaries, thesauri, and concept maps. You may also come across useful terms while conducting background research on your topic. Databases' suggested subject terms can also be useful.
The table below shows some of the synonyms, antonyms, and related terms that could be used when creating a search statement to answer the research question mentioned earlier, "What is the relationship between telecommuting and employee retention?"
| telecommuting | retention |
| teleworking | turnover |
| working from home | |
| working at home |
Incorporating Boolean operators, parentheses, quotation marks, truncation/wildcard characters, and/or proximity operators into your search statement as appropriate will help ensure that your search results are relevant to your research topic.
A basic search statement consists of all of your keywords and related terms, along with Boolean operators such as AND, OR, and NOT. The table below explains the effect of using Boolean operators in your search statements.
| Boolean operator | When to use this operator | Sample search statement using this operator | Result of the sample search |
| AND | Use AND between terms to find documents in which each of the terms appears. Using AND narrows your search, leading to fewer results. AND is generally used between different concepts. | cats AND dogs | Only documents that mention both cats and dogs will be retrieved. This will be a fairly small set of documents because it will not include documents that discuss only cats or only dogs. |
| OR | Use OR between terms to find documents in which either or both of the terms appears. Using OR broadens your search, leading to more results. OR is generally used between synonyms or related terms. | cats OR dogs | Documents that discuss only cats will be retrieved, as well as documents that discuss only dogs. Documents that discuss both cats and dogs will also be retrieved. |
| NOT* | Use NOT between terms to find documents in which the term before NOT appears and the term after NOT does not. NOT should be used sparingly in searches because it may result in inadvertent exclusion of relevant documents. | cats NOT dogs | Documents that discuss cats but that do not discuss dogs will be retrieved. Any documents that discuss both cats and dogs will not be retrieved by this search, so fewer documents will be retrieved by this search than would be by a search for just cats. |
* Some databases may use AND NOT rather than NOT. Consult the "help" or "search tips" page of the database you're using to see which Boolean operator it uses.
Whenever you create a search statement that includes more than one type of Boolean operator, you will need to use parentheses in your search statement to indicate how your search statement should be processed. Parentheses are generally used to group similar concepts together, so you will most often put parentheses around terms separated by OR.
For example, to find articles that discuss the relationship between telecommuting and employee retention, your search statement could look like this:
(telecommuting OR teleworking OR "working from home" OR "working at home") AND (retention OR turnover)
As suggested by the search statement shown above, whenever you want to find documents that contain a phrase consisting of two or more words, you should put quotation marks around the entire phrase, since this tells the database to search for the words as a phrase (that is, appearing together and in the order given) rather than as separate keywords.
In many databases, if quotation marks are not placed around phrases of two or more words, the database will treat the phrase as if the Boolean operator AND appeared between the terms, which could possibly lead to irrelevant search results. For example, if you searched for human resources rather than for "human resources", your search results could potentially include documents that have nothing to do with human resources. (You could, for example, find an article that says, "Earth's valuable resources, such as trees and clean water, are being depleted quickly. The human effect on the planet has been profound." The terms human and resources both appear in the article, but the article is not about human resources.)
Quotation marks should not be placed around individual keywords. It is only necessary to place quotation marks around phrases of two or more words.
Rather than having to think of and type out all possible variations of a search word or phrase, you can use a truncation symbol or wildcard character in order to retrieve documents that contain different variations of the word or phrase.
Wildcard characters generally are used to stand for exactly one letter. In a database that uses ? as a wildcard character, a search for wom?n would retrieve articles that contain woman and/or women.
Truncation symbols are used to replace zero or more letters in a word. In a database that uses * as a truncation symbol, a search for manag* would retrieve articles that contain manage, manager, managers, managing, management, and so on -- all words that begin with the root manag.
Consult the "help" or "search tips" page of the database you're using to see whether it allows wildcard and/or truncation searching and to see which symbols it uses.
The use of truncation in a search statement will broaden your search, increasing the number of results returned by your search.
t is therefore important to truncate search terms appropriately, so that your search will be neither too narrow nor too broad. If you wanted to find articles that contain some form of the word plagiarism, for example, it would not be a good idea to search for plag* since your search could then retrieve irrelevant documents containing words such as plague. But it also would not be a good idea to search for plagiaris* since your search would then exclude documents containing plagiarize, plagiarized, and so on. To find articles about plagiarism, then, it would be best to search for plagiar*.
If the search statement noted above were revised to include truncation where appropriate, it would look like this:
(telecommut* OR telework* OR "work* from home" OR "work* at home") AND (retention OR turnover)
Note that most databases allow you to use a truncation symbol in a phrase that appears between quotation marks. So a search for "work* from home" will find documents that contain the phrase work from home as well as documents that contain the phrase working from home, worked from home, etc.
A summary of tips for searching various UMUC Library databases can be found in our table of Database Search Tips by Vendor.
If you have any questions about this information, please use the UMUC Library's Ask a Librarian service to receive assistance.