Religion and Theology - Information Competency: Building a search strategy from keywords

Now you know where to search and how to do that. However this does not comprise the whole searching process. New issues may arise. For instance, searches can either provide too many hits or too few hits. Chances are that your search results force you to adjust your strategies. There are many ways to do this:

• define your subject as specific as possible
• formulate a search query

A general principle in science is to first make your subject more specific before you actually construct a search strategy. The linked Libguide explains which steps to take.

Once you have decided what to investigate, you need to narrow down the research to make your (re)search question more specific. You can do this by asking yourself five, simple, but effective questions, the so-called W-questions: who, what, where, when, why (and how).

For example take this research question:
Under what circumstances do business policies conflict with religious beliefs in religion based companies?

• What: business and religious beliefs
• Who: Humans
• When: their belief conflicts
• Where: USA or EU
• Why: to investigate if religious belief can conflict with making profit

Each time you answer the question the search becomes more specific. Search question: To investigate under which circumstances business policies can conflict with religious belief

Summarized

• Ask yourself so-called what, where, when, why, who (and how) questions. Each time you give yourself an answer you become more specific.
• Think of alternative and/ or related keywords.
• Put them all in one single string (preferably in Word, so you can use the same strategy in several databases).
• Copy - paste these strings into different fields in your search engine.

A search strategy could like like this:

• string one: conflict OR struggle OR strife OR contradict OR collide etc.
• AND
• string 2: business policy OR company policy OR business ethics OR corporate ethics
• AND
• string 3: belief OR conviction OR principles OR values OR faith OR opinion etc

AND and OR are written in capitals. This enables search engines to recognize these words as operators and not as part of a sentence.