Civil Engineering, Architectural Engineering, and Construction Management Research Guide

Use these tips to begin your research:

1. Identify keywords
   • Library search tools don't respond well to natural language searching (where you type in your whole question or sentence) instead, you need to identify only the most important words (keywords) in your research question or topic.
2. Think of synonyms and related terms:
   • Library search tools are built to find exact matches so a search for "students" will only find resources with that term and won't find resources with the term "learners" even though they might be relevant to your topic. To ensure that you're not missing important information, take some time to think about synonyms and related terms for each of your keywords.
3. Build a search query:
   • Create a search set of synonyms (use "OR" operator) for a concept
   • Combine search sets for concepts with "AND" operator
   • use quote marks " " to identify a phrase
   • Use truncation and wild cards to expand based on a word stem (e.g., nano* )
4. Narrow your results:
   • Use refine or limit features to narrow your search results by date, material type, treatment, etc.
5. Examine search result record to see what subjects have been assigned (if any) to the record.
6. Try citation searching
   • Expand to related articles with shared citations
   • Use citation searching and browsing features, including sorting by # of times cited

The following tips will help you to get access to resources and stay up-to-date with research in your field:

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