michigan informatics

Formulate Your Question

Being able to clearly define the information that you need is vital to your successful search. Use the following steps to help you formulate your question by specifying exactly what concepts you need to include in your search, and which specific terms to use including synonyms, related terms, and alternate endings, as well as how to combine your terms.

Step 1: Identify each concept
You need to be able to identify each individual topic within your search question which is necessary to retrieving useful articles.

For example, if you are searching for articles on nursing shortages in hospitals, your three concepts would be: 1) Nursing 2) Shortages 3) Hospitals.

A more complex question is the effect of violent media on the behavior of children in the U.S. You potentially have six separate concepts: 1) Violent 2) Media 3) Children 4) Effect 5) Behavior 6) United States. Most of the databases you will be searching, however, will have a strong U.S. bias, so you will probably not need to include the term United States. If you do include that term, then you may not retrieve any articles which do not mention the U.S. specifically, even when it is the country covered. If you find that you are retrieving too many non-U.S. articles, limiting your search to articles written in the English language is usually effective. This then leaves you with five concepts: 1) Violent 2) Media 3) Children 4) Effect 5) Behavior. If you are searching in a biomedical, sociological, or psychological database, you will probably find that searching on the concepts of 1) Violent 2)Media and 3) Children will automatically retrieve articles on the behavioral effects.

Concepts such as cause and effect are very difficult to search on because the terms are often assumed and not included in the title or abstract of the article. In order to retrieve the widest results, you should search only on the concepts which are absolutely necessary to finding answers to your question. If you find that you are retrieving too many articles, then you can always begin to add in additional topics.

Step 2: Identify synonyms, alternate endings, and related concepts
You next need to identify synonyms, alternate spellings, alternate endings, and terms which are closely related to you concept.

For example, when you search for the concept of nursing, you will want to search on the terms 1) nursing 2) nurse 3) nurses.

For the concept of media, you may want to include the terms 1) media 2) television 3) movies 4) video games 5) comic books 6) graphic novels 7) web sites and more.

Step 3: Combine your search terms
Once you have identified the terms that you need to search on, it is time to combine your terms in a logical order using Boolean operators such as AND and OR. Use parentheses to group synonyms together.

For example: (violent OR violence OR weapons OR guns) AND (media OR television OR movies) AND (children OR child OR kids OR preschoolers)

Practice: Formulate Your Question