Skip to main content
Subject Guides

Skills Guides

Preparing your search

Break down your research question

Planning your search can help you find everything you need. Identify which terms are necessary to include in your search, and consider different ways in which those concepts could be expressed...

Think about what you're searching

Searching the catalogue, 1980s-style

How you go about your search will depend on where it is you're searching.

Most academic resources will not include the full text of an article, so your search terms will need to match against things like the title, author names, abstract summary, and any keywords that have been added by the cataloguers.

Look at your search results to see what your search terms have been matched against. The search results may suggest other terms to try.

Forthcoming training sessions

Forthcoming sessions on :

Show details & booking for these sessions

There's more training events at:

Framing your research question

In this session we look at how to come up with a workable research question with regard to available literature: is there enough information to provide a suitable background? What limits will you need to set? It's a session which is ideal for anyone about to start on a dissertation or thesis. We explore a range of different sources including academic, government and organisational literature.
https://subjectguides.york.ac.uk/skills/search-basics
subjectguides.york.ac.uk
crawl=CC-MAIN-2020-40
131802
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:YWLNDVRQGXJ5WSVZVWUCGGLBKSMHKH4G
<urn:uuid:434a3c42-9b1d-43bf-a169-468ca20e90d8>
2020-09-27T06:48:18Z
34.254.34.59
text/html
sha1:CQEA4DPSY4EN7QZWJD65KI53JJE6GO4C
<urn:uuid:d4ae4eef-3170-419a-81f2-9feb3389df74>
https://subjectguides.york.ac.uk/skills/search-basics
response
<urn:uuid:65f9e31c-95b0-49b5-8788-58b351993f6f>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-40
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for September 2020
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-232.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.17 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/