Doctoral Formation Seminar
Course Number: SK820
Subject: Social Work
Introduction
This guide accompanies an in-class workshop about developing and documenting a search strategy for peer-reviewed articles.
- To meet with a librarian, contact Meredith Fischer mefischer@wlu.ca until June 26, or Greg Sennema gsennema@wlu.ca after June 26.
- Start the Checklist for Developing and Documenting Search Strategy, and bring it to your librarian meeting. Note: the checklist is a template for writing out your search process efficiently and clearly.
What are you researching?
Where did you search?
There is a list of databases relevant to Social Work. Choose databases to search for your topic based on the descriptions.
- Limit results to peer-reviewed.
- Discover key articles.
- Recognize key scholars.
- Avoid missing important results.
- Cut out irrelevant results.
How did you search?
Try using some of the following database search tactics to get better results.
What is the tactic? | What does the tactic do? | Examples |
|---|---|---|
Boolean AND | Use AND to ensure that all terms appear in every search result. | depression AND home care |
Boolean OR | Use OR to ensure that at least one term appears in every search result. | transgender OR LGBTQ OR GLBT |
Phrase searching | Use “quotation marks” to find more than one term in a row. | “brain cancer” |
Truncation | Use an asterisk* at the end of a term to include multiple endings. | trauma* trauma, traumatic, traumatically, traumatize, traumatized, traumatizing |
Wildcard | Use a question mark ? within a term to search for variations of a single character. | decoloni?e decolonize, decolonise |
What tools did you use?
Zotero is a free citation management tool. Use it to:
- Manage all sources in one place.
- Create folders and subfolders for projects.
- Store, read, annotate PDFs.
- Save screenshots from websites.
- Access sources from any browser.
- Create group libraries.
- Create and update in-text citations and references automatically.