Find relevant resources by creating a search string you can use in Omni, databases, and even with Google. What is a search string? It is a combination of keywords, truncation symbols, and boolean operators that tells a search interface what sort of resources you are searching for. You can develop a search string by following these steps.
Keywords are the words that describe your research topic. They can be a single word or short phrase that relates to a concept in your research. Keywords are essential for conducting effective searches in library catalogues and databases, since they help you pinpoint relevant articles and resources. You can begin to identify your keywords from your research topic or question.
To find your keywords, select the words in your topic/research question that get at the core ideas of your research.
For example, look at the following research question:
What role does ecotourism play in balancing biodiversity conservation and economic growth?
The important concepts from this topic are ecotourism, biodiversity, and economic growth.
These terms are essential to describe the main concepts of the research question. Searching with them will help you find resources that discuss these concepts while sorting out the irrelevant resources.
Researchers may use different words to describe the same concept. You don’t want to miss relevant research just because a researcher used a different word, so it is a good idea to think of the alternate keywords that could be used to describe your topic. Coming up with synonyms or related terms will broaden your search results while keeping them relevant.
If we take our keywords from above, we can brainstorm other terms that could also be used to describe the topic:
| Concept 1 | Concept 2 | Concept 3 |
| ecotourism | biodiversity | economic growth |
| eco-friendly tourism | conservation | |
| green tourism | species diversity | |
| responsible tourism | ecological integrity | |
| sustainable tourism |
In addition to brainstorming synonyms and related terms, you can also use words and concepts you find in relevant research. This can be especially useful as you become more familiar with your topic.
Boolean Operators and search commands are used to connect your search terms in specific ways to either broaden or narrow the scope of a search, allowing you to retrieve more relevant sources.
AND, OR, Quotation Marks (“”), and Asterisk (*) are the most common Boolean Operators.
AND:
For example, searching for “ecotourism AND biodiversity" will return only records of resources that contain both terms.
This is useful for combining different concepts to focus the search on specific intersections in the literature.
OR:
For example, "biodiversity OR conservation" will retrieve records that mention one or more of the terms. Use OR between your synonyms or related terms.
Quotation Marks (“”):
For example: “sustainable tourism,” “economic growth”
Asterisk (*):
The asterisk can be placed at the end of a root word to search for all possible endings of that word. This is called truncation.
For example, searching for "ecotour*" will retrieve results that include "ecotour," "ecotours," "ecotourism," and "ecotourist."
Be careful where you place the asterisk since putting it too early in a word can make it search for unintended words.
For example: searching Can* when you would like to search variations on Canada, will also return words like cannabis, canal, cancer, and canon.
If we put it all together into a search string, it might look like this:
ecotour* OR “eco-friendly tourism” OR “green tourism” OR “responsible tourism” OR “sustainable tourism”
AND
biodiversity OR conversation OR “species diversity” OR “ecological integrity”
AND
“economic growth”
Learn more about choosing a research topic, finding background information, search strategies, finding and evaluating resources, writing, and citation with this helpful guide.