HIST 3530 - History of Africa to 1800: Developing a Search Strategy

Developing an effective search strategy involves:

• Formulating a research topic/question
• Identifying related terms to your key search concepts
• Using standard search structures to broaden and narrow your search results
• Identifying and assessing information

While there is no one right way to do a search, the strategies identified here will improve your results.

Never use sentence structure, such as your research question or thesis statement.

A keyword is a word used to search library catalogs, article databases (GALILEO), and search engines in order to locate results that match that word in a specified part or in any part of the item, such as the title or in the full text. Once you have identified your key search concepts, start noting down some related terms or synonyms to your key concepts.

TIP: Use a general thesaurus, subject dictionaries, subject encyclopedias, and subject headings to help you formulate keywords.

Boolean searching involves adding or subtracting terms from your search to either broaden or narrow your search. It uses 3 terms (AND, OR, and NOT) to tell the search engine or database whether to include or eliminate certain terms. 

Quotation marks can be used to identify phrases.

By using quotations marks, you are telling the computer to only bring back pages with the terms you typed in the exact order you typed them.

“Aksumite Kingdom”
Instead of
Aksumite AND Kingdom

“Atlantic Slave Trade”
Instead of
Atlantic AND Slave AND Trade

“Nubian Christianity”
Instead of
Nubian AND Christianity

Truncation allows you to search various forms of a word by finding alternate endings. The character (*) is placed at the end of the first few letters of a search term or at the end of its root.

Archiv* retrieves
Archival, Archive, Archives, Archivist, Archivists