Not Enough Results
Key Takeaways
Don't have enough results? Try:
- Using search terms that experts might use to talk about a topic.
- If you don't know what search terms to use, try googling your topic for background information.
- Add an asterisk to search for words with the same root.
This probably won’t ever be a problem with big search engines like Google that search through a lot of different content from sources that won’t be useful for your research, but you may come across this problem fairly often in a library database. If you have too few results or not any, it could mean that you are using different terms to describe your topic than the people writing about your topic.
Word Choice Matters.
First think about how your topic would be expressed in the type of source you want. A scholarly article talking about first generation college students grades might use the term academic performance instead of grades. Are you unsure of what terms experts might use to talk about your topic? Try googling your topic to find additional ways your topic might be expressed, but come back to the library for better sources.
Combine like terms using OR.
Once you find different ways your concept is expressed or different related concepts, you can search all these terms at one time by combining them with the word OR. (Sometimes you have to capitalize the term OR sometimes you don’t depending on the database. So just always capitalize it just in case.) Here is an example of a search about cigarette alternatives and youth using the related concepts (vaping OR e-cigarettes) AND (youth OR adolescents OR teenagers).
A search using synonyms combined with OR.
Use truncation.
Sometimes databases will let you use a symbol to search for terms with shared stems. Enter the root of the word followed by the truncation symbol(usually an asterisk) and the database will search for all words with that same root.
A search for child* will retrieve all results with the terms child, children, childhood…
The first result of this search for child* is an article with the word childhood in the title.