Introduction
Search strategies clip ( subtitles in English)
The success of your search depends on using the right sources and applying the right strategies to those sources. You will now combine the search terms you came up with earlier to help you carry out the right search. To do so, you can draw on several search strategies. Watch the video below to learn more about smart searching.
Quotation marks
By placing one or more search terms in quotation marks, you are telling the search engine to find these terms in that specific order. Quotation marks can be used to search for a first and last name, for example. Many of the words that are combined in Dutch are written as two separate words in English. Placing these words in quotation marks lets you search for the word combination.
Examples of using quotation marks in a search:
“Henk Jansen”
"sustainable energy"
Boolean searching
A Boolean search allows users to combine keywords with operators such as AND, NOT and OR for a more specific combined search. This may be relevant for your search results and will help you further refine the results that are displayed. In the following examples, the search results are shown in black.
See Google Doodle Video
AND operator (search for: "sustainable energy" AND "municipality")
Result: pages that contain both the terms "sustainable energy" and "municipality".
OR operator (search: "solar energy" OR "wind energy")
Result: pages that contain at least one of the search terms. Both terms may also appear in the results.
NOT operator (search: "sustainable energy" NOT "wind energy")
Result: pages that contain the term "sustainable energy" but not the term "wind energy".
You can now combine the search terms you defined in the step 'Developing key concepts'. This is called the building block method.
In addition to the building block method, you can also use other methods, such as the best match method. Click here for more information about other search methods.
Truncation and masking
The symbols for truncation and masking can differ per database. Most of the time, an asterisk (*) is used (for HANQuest and ScienceDirect), but sometimes a question mark (?) is used instead (Catalogue and Picarta). Make sure you look into this before you start your search.
sust? or sust* searches for:
- sustainable
- sustainably
- sustainability
organi?ation or organi*ation searches for:
- organisation
- organization
a*tivit* searches for:
- activities
- activity
- aktivität
Refining your search
If your search generates a lot of results, you can refine them by using limiters such as:
•(Language) Search results in Dutch
•(Geography) Results specific to the Netherlands
•(Date) Results published in the last five years
•(Discipline) Results written for a specific discipline
Keep in mind that adding limiters may omit relevant publications from your results.