Education: Help with searching

Video series - finding literature for your major study

Below is a short videos series to guide you through the process of finding sources for your major study. They are also useful for any student who wants to develop their information skills. We recommend you watch the Getting started and Planning and keywords videos before you start searching.

You can revisit these during the process whenever you need advice on the different stages. If you need more help, you can contact your Subject Librarians by emailing library@hud.ac.uk

Advanced search tips for Library Search and specialist databases:

• Phrasemarks ensure that you only find results where those words are together in that order e.g. “national curriculum”
• An asterisk will search for any group of letters e.g. educat* will find education, educations, educator, etc
• A question mark will search for one letter e.g. wom?n will find women and woman

One of the difficult things about searching is deciding how many search terms to use? Too few and you'll get lots of irrelevant results. Too many and you may miss some really good articles because the search brings back very few results.