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PSCI 3300: Introduction to Political Research

Library research guide for PSCI 2300

Search Strategies to Enhance Research 

This page is designed to introduce you to search strategies to find review-reviewed articles in databases and library systems.. If you don't find what you are looking for or need help using them, contact a librarian like Brea Henson, Political Science Librarian. 

Getting Started: What is Peer-Review?

Many instructors require you to use peer-reviewed sources for your papers and projects, but what does that mean?

  • Peer review is the process of having experts in a field review the quality of an article or book before it is published
  • Most articles in scholarly and academic journals are peer-reviewed
  • Books published by university or academic presses are peer-reviewed

Most databases allow you to limit your search to peer-reviewed articles.

Developing a Search Strategy

A search strategy is an organized structure of key terms used to search a database. The search strategy combines the key concepts of your search question in order to retrieve accurate results.

Your search strategy will account for all:

  • possible search terms
  • keywords and phrases
  • truncated and wildcard variations of search terms
  • subject headings (where applicable)

Each database works differently so you need to adapt your search strategy for each database. You may wish to develop a number of separate search strategies if your research covers several different areas.

It is a good idea to test your strategies and refine them after you have reviewed the search results.

"Literature search explained: Develop a search Strategy." University of Leeds. https://library.leeds.ac.uk/info/1404/literature_searching/14/literature_searching_explained/4

Tip for Success

It might be helpful to keep a list ot terms, combinations of terms, number of results, and which databases were tried. The 2300 Research Log file below can help you develop a search strategy.

Step-by-Step Strategies

Keep in mind that research is an iterative process so you will have to do multiple searches in more than one database for maxim results. 

Practice Assignment and Additional Reading for Advanced Search Strategies

BASIC/ADVANCED: Find keyword synonyms

When you don't know synonyms for your topic keywords, you can use online dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference books to find them. You can also use Wikipedia to find a definition or synonym for a word, but don't use it as a source for your paper or project because it is not authoritative.

Copyright © University of North Texas. Some rights reserved. Except where otherwise indicated, the content of this library guide is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. Suggested citation for citing this guide when adapting it:

This work is a derivative of "PSCI 3300: Introduction to Political Research", created by [author name if apparent] and © University of North Texas, used under CC BY-NC 4.0 International.

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