Challenge yourself and prepare for degree study

If you have a good grasp of the Basic and Intermediate levels, you have developed the core skills you need to conduct literature research.

This level will show you some advanced skills to improve your research skills even further - completing this level will take you further than the minimum skills you need and really help you prepare for your degree studies.

Planning a literature search

For the most effective and efficient research, you need to plan how you will conduct your research.

This tutorial by the University of York Library can help you plan for effective research - make sure you look at the document Planning your literature search

Searching superpowers

Wildcards & truncations

You can refine your searches even more closely using these two strategies:

• wildcards: use ? to replace letters in a word. This is useful to find alternative terms or spellings

be?t -> beat, best, belt, bent

• truncations: use * to search for all words that start with a truncated (shortened) word. This is useful to find all terms related to a root.

athlet* -> athlete, athletics

Task: use wildcards and truncations

Avoiding insignificant words

There are many small words that are important grammatically, but do not add meaning. Because of this, these words are usually ignored in searches, and are sometimes called stop words.

Some examples of stop words are:

• articles: a, an, the
• the verb to be: is, am, are
• prepositions: in, of, into, on, over etc. (NOTE! if part of a phrase, they should not be ignored)
• some other words: which, that, if

To make your search more efficient, you should avoid using stop words in your search.

Task: understand stop words

Using subject-specific databases

For more targetted searches, you an use subject-specific databases. These work in a similar way to YorSearch and Google Scholar, but may contain more sources related to your topic.

Task: explore subject-specific datatbases

Choose one or two databases that might be relevant for your subject and see what you can find.

Reference Management Systems

When you've found sources, reference management can help you to:

• organise sources
• cite and reference information correctly (yes, the software can produce references for you!)
• highlight and make notes on sources

Task: learn the basics of reference management systems