ENGL 4092 Technical and Scientific Writing Library Research Guide

We all create information for different purposes and different audiences. Consider who your audience while writing and choosing language and terminology that is most likely to be understood by them will help you improve your ability to communicate effectively.

This technique will also help you while searching for relevant information! When you are searching for information, considering who the author is/could be, why they are creating this information, and who their intended audience is will also help you identify the best place to search and the best words/terminology to use when searching.

Before you begin searching think about what type of information you need to answer your question. Try to picture what type(s) of content are most likely to have the answer to your questions. Compare searching to shopping but for information. If you know you need shoes and you go to a shoe store your are more likely to find shoes. If you go to database or online resource with the type of information you need you are more likely to find relevant resources. 

• What is the most important piece(s) of this search? (i.e. what must be in an article/book/standard/technical report/etc  for it to be a relevant search result?)
• Are there any other ways to describe this concept? (identify possibly synonyms and/or subject terms)
• What type of resource is best to answer this question and where should I search first?

Expert tip: for complicated searches remember to take notes about where you search and what terms you try! If you don't keep try you might find yourself starting from the beginning and repeating your work if you end up working on your search for a long time or over multiple days.

Start with a keyword search, then refine by subject or other facets later. 

Building 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* )

Narrow your results:

• Examine search result record to see what subjects have been assigned (if any) to the record. Subjects can be combined with keywords to focus search, or searched individually to find items that are primarily about the topic.
• Use refine or limit features such as date, material type (e.g., review article), treatment (in Compendex - theoretical, applied, etc).

Citation searching

• Expand to related articles with shared citations (Scopus)
• Use citation searching and browsing features, including sorting by # of times cited (Scopus, SciFinder, Google Scholar, etc).