Doctor of Education (EdD) Program Guide

Search Terms 

When you do a search in Google, you can search for entire sentences:

That tactic won’t work when you are looking for research articles in the library’s databases.  When you search in the library’s databases: you need to only look for those terms that are most critical to your research topic.  

If we take the Google example above, we could try:

We pulled out the most critical pieces to the research question: 

climate change,

biodiversity, and

rainforest. 

Search for synonyms, too. We searched for climate change. 

Also make sure to search for ‘global warming’ and even ‘green house effect’. 

Part of being a good researcher is making sure you are thorough - part of being thorough is using the right terms for your search.

Use the boolean operator ‘or’ to tell the database to search for articles on climate change OR global warming.  This will result in articles written on either topic.