COMM 300 - Principles of Communication: Search Strategies

1. Identify your information need

For beginning your search for research articles, consider your research question and identify the key components. 

How does teenage bullying impact school performance?

• Concept 1: Bullying
• Concept 2: School performance
• Concept 3 (often population): Teenager

Also, consider the other criteria; for example: Do you need peer-reviewed articles? Do you need the most recent research or an overview of how the research has evolved over time? 

2. Define your terms

Do any of the concepts need to be operationalized or more focused? Remember, the variables need to be measurable in some way.  

For example, what does "school performance" mean? We'll need to decide if we want to look at academic achievement (measurable via grades, graduation rates, etc. or something captured via an instrument or survey (like strong social networks).

3. Brainstorm synonyms or related terms that might be helpful for the search

• Concept 1: Bullying, harassment
• Concept 2: Academic achievement, grades, high school completion
• Concept 3 (often population): Students, adolescents

Scope and Functionality Differences

Disciplinary databases search a defined set of resources, all focused on a particular field of study (e.g. Communication) 

• established list of journals indexed
• dissertations
• conference proceedings

Functionality:

• Complex searches possible
• Searches keyword in title, abstract, and other record fields
• Can use subject headings to search
• Results ranked by publication date (newest first)

Web of Science

Multidisciplinary database covering the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Indexes the highest impact journals in each field. 

• established list of journals indexed
• conference proceedings

Functionality:

• Complex searches possible
• Searches keyword in title, abstract, and other record fields
• No subject headings
• Results ranked by publication date (newest first)

Google Scholar searches across resources from all disciplines/subject areas:

• journals publisher websites
• professional association websites
• university websites
• Google Books

Functionality:

• Searches the full text of the article for keywords
• No subject headings  
• Results ranked by combination of times cited and Google algorithm

Before you start searching for resources, take a few moments to think of the relevant terms that you might want to search with. This will help you build and revise your search.

Another valuable way to find related articles is to utilize the references and "cited by"s of any article you already have. Article authors have done a literature review, and so they have identified more articles on the topic for you. 

Also, after an article has been published, other authors working in the same research are likely to cite it in their literature review. Most databases will display a "cited by" link to other articles. For example: