1. How do I search for my topic?
- Identify the keywords of your topic and use those as your search words.
- Each article has tags assigned to it, words or shorts phrases that make each article searchable
- You want your search words to match those tags
- Words like impact, factors, effects, or effective are not used as tags
- Example: The topic for your research paper and presentation is: What factors affect the mental health of gay teenagers?
- Search: mental health gay teenagers.
2. How do I focus the search hits to meet my assignment requirements?
- Use Refine Your Search options to focus your search hits to just scientific articles
- Check Peer Review
- Check Journal article under Content Type
- Scroll the Publication Date bar to a recent year to focus your search hits to current research
- When you find an article that you like and want to use, click on the Cited By number beside Web of Science to open a list of articles that have cited that article
3. I have too many irrelevant search hits. How do I focus them?
- When you find an article that looks interesting, look at its assigned tags (subjects)
- Add any relevant tags to your search
- This will also help you develop your research questions and search for books and articles for them
4. How do I know my search words match the tags assigned to articles about my research question?
- As you scroll through the search hits, look at the Subjects (tags) assigned to the relevant articles you find, and see if they match your search words
- Subjects (tags) also help you identify the specific issues around your topic so you can give it direction and develop it into a focused research question
5. I can't find anything on my research question. What do I do?
- There may not be research tying your main ideas together yet.
- Try searching for your main ideas separately and linking their findings together
- If you've found one article that's relevant for your topic:
- Click on the Cited By number beside Web of Science to open a list of articles that have cited that article
- Look through the sources in its References list to see if any of them are also relevant to your research
