Civil Engineering

When using search engines or library databases, choose search keywords based on your topic's key concepts. Sample keywords in civil engineering can include: earthquake engineering, excavation fills, waste water management, soil dynamics, tunnels, or ocean waves. New terminology is constantly emerging, so it is important to look at the keywords associated with relevant articles that you have already found. 

To develop your search question:

1. Identify your key concepts by writing out your research question and highlighting the main ideas. These become your initial set of search terms.
2. Key concepts can often be described in multiple ways. Identify synonyms or related terms for your key concepts for additional search terms. 

Place quotation marks around two or more words that you would like to keep together as a phrase. For example, "artificial intelligence". Next, you will need to translate your keywords into language that a search engine recognizes.  Here are several strategies:

• Use * to truncate a word. For example, contruct* will look for construction, constructing, constructed, constructs.
• A concept can be described by more than one word. Use the operator OR to gather all the records that have either keyword. For example, strain OR stress. You can place these within parentheses to isolate a single concept: (strain OR stress).

As you search, you may want to look for records that have all the concepts. Use the operator AND to join the different concepts.

Here's what a final search string could look like:

"artificial intelligence" AND construct* AND (strain OR stress)

Queen's University Library subscribes to both multidisciplinary and subject-specific databases. When choosing a database, you should consider several factors, such as:

1. The type of information you are looking for (journal articles, monographs, definitions, standards, chemical properties, maps, raw data).
2. The academic subject area.

Once you have narrowed that down, you can browse QUL's databases alphabetically or by subject area. Each database has a short description about what is included (full-text articles or abstract only) and a date range for coverage.

Your first attempt at searching may not produce the results that you were hoping for, and that's okay! You may find that you are getting too many or too few results, or that you have had to rework your topic based on the available literature. You can use what you learned in your first search to revise your search strategy. 

Many databases such as Scopus or Web of Science tag each article with keywords and subjects. When you find a relevant article, take a look at the keywords and subject terms that the database has assigned and use these in your next search string. 

Databases also have many choices for refining or filtering your search results. You may want to try refining by publication date, country, source type (article, book, review), or even a subject-area.