Think back to the beginning of this course. The first module covered how to make a Mind Map and how to brainstorm your way to a new research question. We also touched briefly on searching. In the second module, we talked about the cycle of information, different types of sources, and we also touched on searching. Today we're going to get into how to create a search strategy. When you're searching in Google, you can use natural language, meaning typing in the way we speak. However, when it comes to academic journal databases, it's important to speak the same language as the database. In this video, I will teach you how to do that. First, let's write out our research question. What is the impact of climate change on communities of color in the United States? Our first step is to identify keywords. Your keywords are the most important concepts in your research question. What are the keywords of this research question? Climate change, communities of color, and the United States. Remember when we were talking about mind mapping, we talked about our key concept, and then creating a research question by bringing in different aspects such as populations or locations. These words are not important as part of our research strategy. So I will cross them out. What about impact? It seems important, right? Our whole question is asking for an impact. However, if I take that word out of this sentence, what does it mean? It loses its meaning when taken out of this sentence. It is our connector word. It's connecting climate change to communities of color. Therefore, it would not make a good keyword. Think about how many results you would get if you used impact as a search term. I'm guessing that it would be too many. So we are not going to use this as a keyword. Let's get back to our keywords now. First, we have climate change, AND communities of color, AND the United States. Why did I write and in all capital letters between these? This is what we call a Boolean operator. But for your purposes, think of it as a connecting word. What we are telling the database is, only give me results that contain climate change, AND communities of color, AND the United States. The AND serves to narrow our search results. Now what if we want to broaden our search results? For that, we use the Boolean term OR. With our OR the next step is to list out synonyms for our keywords. Can you think of any synonyms for climate change? Now when I say synonym, I don't mean a word that means exactly the same word. What I need is to think about what other people might call climate change. Do we sometimes hear it called global warming about the greenhouse effect? These terms do not mean exactly the same thing, but they are the same general concept. Same thing goes for communities of color. This is a very broad expression. It refers to many different people. Think about those communities within the communities of color. What search terms would we use to find them? We could use African American, OR Latinos, OR Native Americans. These terms in no way represent all of the communities of color in the United States. However, for a starting search strategy, these would be good words to use. I may have to adjust this later on. How about United States? Are there any synonyms for the United States? We often call the United States simply America. Now we have our synonym, our keywords, and our Boolean operators. With this search strategy, we are telling the database to return any result that has climate change, OR global warming, OR the greenhouse effect, AND communities of color, OR African American, OR Latinos, OR Native Americans, AND United States, OR America. Next, let's go over some other tools that I can use in my search strategy. I'm going to put climate change in quotation marks. What this does for me is to tell the database that I don't want any article that has the word climate in any word that has the word change in it. That would give me too many results. I only want articles that have the exact expression "climate change" together next to each other. I can put quotation marks around many of my search terms. One thing I don't need to do is to put quotation marks around a single word, for instance, America. There is no need to put quotation marks around that. This is only for two or more words that go together. It also needs to be for known English expression. I cannot just string together any old words and put a quotation mark around them. I am not going to find that in the database. For instance, if I decided that a synonym for communities of color would be villages of color, and I put that in quotation marks, I would not get any results because that is not a commonly used English expression. The next tool that I'm going to introduce you to is what's called truncation. For truncation, I can take things like Latinos and put an asterix at the end of it. This way, the database will not only return Latinos, but it will also give me Latina, Latino, Latinx, Latinos. Our next step, we're going to put these search terms into a database and see what results we get. If we have too many results, the next step would be to add more keywords. If we have too few results, we should think about removing a keyword, or thinking of new synonyms. Just like we did the first week, we're going to use the UB Libraries, everything search to demonstrate our search strategy. If you go to the homepage, library.buffalo.edu, and click on this little carrot, it will bring you to the advanced search page. Take a look at this. Does it look familiar? All you need to do is copy and paste your search strategy that you laid out before. You'll notice that I kept the OR capitalized, and you will see that these ANDs were inserted automatically for you. Like I did previously, I'm going to click on "Open Access". This will not give me the most results, but it will always get you results that anybody can access. The next step would be to browse through the titles that you got. There's 8,000 results. That's too many, just like with our shoe search in Amazon, that was too many results. You'll want to think about what exactly you're looking for. Are you looking for only things that were available online? Only things that are peer-reviewed? Do you want articles, or maybe an e-book? You can also think about publication date. Do I want stuff about climate change that goes back to 1992? Probably not. Let's try 2010. We'll click on "Articles", and "Peer-review", and "Available Online". That didn't reduce this very much, we're only down to 6,900. Next step you'll want to think about is maybe removing some synonyms, or even adding a keyword. One thing you can do as well, is if you do find an article that's really good, that you think has exactly what you're looking for, be sure to open it up, go to the article, and read some of it. In the abstract, which is the summary of the article, you might find some other keywords to search for. I can see right off the top of my head communities of color, it says indigenous people, geographically isolated, and socioeconomically disadvantaged. These may be other search aspects that I want to incorporate into my search strategy.
