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My Learning Essentials

Planning ahead:
Making your search work
CHEAT SHEET

@mlemanchester
www. escholar.manchester.ac.uk/learning-objects/mle/planning-search
The planning process

There are seven steps involved in planning your search:

EXAMINE your
question IDENTIFY your key
concepts

IDENTIFY alternative
search terms CONSIDER using
limits

COMBINE your
search terms REVIEW your
results

ADJUST your strategy

We’ll now look at each of these steps in a little more detail.

Step 1: Examine your question

The first step is to define what your question is.

You may already have been given your assignment title, but you still need to
ensure that you thoroughly understand it. This includes:

1. understanding all of the terms in your question

2. knowing what depth of information you need
3. considering the parameters of your research, eg it may cover a particular time
period or geographical region

ADVANCED TIP
In other cases, for example when writing your dissertation, you will
set your own title. In such cases, you need to think carefully about the
parameters of your research:

1. Is there enough literature on your topic?

2. Is the scope of your topic realistic?
Step 2: Identify your key concepts

The next stage is to identify the key concepts in your question.

Key concepts are the nouns in your assignment title. These are the different
chunks of meaning that define what the question is about.

Other types of terms in your question might be:

Instruction words: normally verbs, these tell you what to do with the
information about the key concepts; eg evaluate, describe, assess.

Limiting words: these may appear in your question to restrict to a

particular location, timeframe, population etc.
 Step 2: Example

Let’s look at an example:

“Evaluate the impact that genetic engineering has had on agriculture”

The key concepts in this assignment title are:

genetic engineering

agriculture
Step 3: Alternative search terms

The key concepts you have identified from your question are the topics you’ll be searching for.

It’s important to consider other words and phrases that might be used to describe these
concepts, in order to perform a thorough search.

These alternative terms might take a number of forms:

Synonyms: most concepts will have other words/phrases which have the same or a
similar meaning as your original term.

Alternative spellings: some terms might have different spellings, especially in

American English. Wildcards allow you to do this.

Alternative endings: you might want to search for different forms of the same root
word, for example plurals or different tenses. You can use truncation to help with
this.
 Step 3: Example
Let’s return to our example:

“Evaluate the impact that genetic engineering has had on agriculture”

We’ve already identified the key concepts:

genetic engineering agriculture

A list of alternative search terms for this title might look like this:

genetic modification farming

biotechnology food
gene targeting crops

Using wildcards, we can reduce the number of search terms to:

contaminat* wildlife
Chin* farming
pollution animal*
Step 4: Consider limits

Now that you have a list of search terms, you need to consider what limits apply
to your search.

These limits may be dictated in your question, or you may wish to focus your research
to a particular timeframe, location or field of study.

On a more practical note, you may also want to limit your search to publications in a
particular language.
 Step 4: Example

Let’s see how this applies to our example:

“Evaluate the impact that genetic engineering has had on agriculture”

Some the limits that might be useful in this example are:

English language

Published since 2005

Studies conducted in the UK

Step 5: Combining your terms

Now that you have your list of search terms, it’s time to put them all together to
perform a search.

There are two ways of combining search terms:

OR: This broadens your search, returning results that contain any but not all of
your search terms. You would use OR to combine terms with the same meaning

AND: This narrows your search, returning results that contain all of your search
terms. You would use AND to combine search terms with different meanings
 Step 5: Example

Looking at our example again:

“Evaluate the impact that genetic engineering has had on agriculture”

This is how the search would look with all of our concepts combined:
Step 6: Review your results

Once you’ve finished formulating your search, it’s time to start searching.

It’s important to remember that searching is an iterative process; you will often
not get the results you want immediately.

You’re satisfied with the list of results returned from your original search, you
may stop at this point. If you get too many or too few results, you will need to
adjust your search strategy. We’ll look at how to do that next.
Step 7: Adjust your strategy

There are two common issues you may encounter with your searches: too few results,
or two many results. If you have too few results, you may not have enough literature to
work with for your assignment. A lot of results might sound like a good thing, but you may
waste a lot of time sorting through them to identify which results are relevant.

There are a number of things you can try to adjust your strategy:

Too few results Too many results

Think of some additional alternative terms Use narrower, more precise search
for your key concepts terms

If you have multiple concepts, remove the Remove some of your alternative search
least important one terms

If you have used limits, remove some of Add another concept to focus the area of
them your research

Use truncation or wildcards to pick up Use more limits

alternative word endings
Returning to our example, this is how our Step 7: Example
original search strategy looked:

This is how we might adjust our strategy for too few results:
Original search strategy looked: Step 7: Example

This is how we might adjust our strategy for too many results:
Summary

We have looked at the stages of planning your search in detail:

EXAMINE your
question IDENTIFY your key
concepts

IDENTIFY alternative
search terms CONSIDER using
limits

COMBINE your
search terms REVIEW your
results

ADJUST your strategy

You should now see how taking a planned and structured approach to your searches will save
you time but providing you with better, more relevant results.
 mle@manchester.ac.uk
Keep in touch!
@mlemanchester

Related resources
Knowing where to look: your search
toolkit
Shopping for information: introducing
subject databases

Know your sources: types of

information