This how to guide will take you through the steps to formulate a search strategy, starting with deconstructing and brainstorming your topic, through to considering truncating or combining search terms.

Spend some time thinking about your topic before you start searching. Pay particular attention to the language you use to both conceptualise and describe the subject you require information about. Take the time to define key descriptors. This will benefit your thinking, and form the basis for your search strategies.

The following steps may help you formulate a search strategy:

1. Determine what the topic is
2. Deconstruct your topic into relevant keywords or phrases
3. Brainstorm related terms to expand your search syntax
4. Consider truncating your search terms
5. Consider combining your search terms 
6. Formulate your search strategy.

In this example, we will consider the following topic: The effects of pollution on frog reproduction.

Are there other ways to express your keywords and phrases to widen the search?

Synonyms

For example:

• Effects OR consequences
• Pollution OR poison OR toxin
• Frog OR amphibian
• Reproduction OR breeding

Note: you may find using a thesaurus or a subject dictionary useful at this point, to help expand your selection of possible keywords.

Spelling variations

Use of the ‘wildcard’ symbol—commonly represented by a question mark (?)—will search for multiple spellings. For example:

• Behavio?r will search both behaviour, behavior.
• Organi?tion will search both organisation, organization.

Acronyms

For example:

• CVD, cardiovascular disease
• ANU, Australian National University

Adding a truncation symbol—commonly an asterisk (*)—after the root of a word will find variations of that word. Truncating words returns variant spellings and endings, and can save you from having to do multiple searches.

For example:

• Frog* will also return the word frogs.
• Pollut* will return the words pollution, pollutant, and pollutants, etc.
• Toxi* will return the words toxic, toxin, toxins, toxicity, and toxicology, etc.
• Reproduc* will return the words reproduce, reproductive and reproduction, etc.

Boolean operators and modifiers let you combine keywords and phrases to retrieve specific search results. They are inserted between your keywords and phrases, and must always appear in UPPER CASE. Taking the time to learn basic Boolean allows you to create increasingly specific searches to find the information you need faster and with less stress.

For example:

Use AND to narrow or focus your search and retrieve records containing only the specified words. For example:

Use OR to broaden your search and retrieve records containing any of the words specified. For example:

If you use the OR operator when searching for acronyms and abbreviations, remember to include the actual term spelt in full as well as the abbreviation. For example:

• spi OR “soy protein isolate”
• pow OR “prisoner of war”
• un OR “united nations”

Use NOT (which sometimes also appears as AND NOT) to narrow your search results and return records that do not contain a specified term. Note: Some search engines do not recognise NOT, so for these you will need to use the minus symbol. For example:

Use parentheses ( ) to group words and phrases together when combining the OR operator with an AND operator in the same search. This is sometimes referred to as Nesting. For example:

There are many different methods you can use to search for the information you need, and the steps outlined above are by no means mandatory.

Some search strategies return better results than others. Learning to be expansive with your language and creative with your search operators/symbols, in conjunction with the many Boolean search operators and modifiers, can boost your searches and save you time and stress.

Remember, it may require you to try a number of different strategies in order to find the ones that work best for your given context.