What is the purpose of this paper?
If you can't answer the above question, you need to go back and look at your assignment or ask your instructor. Your syllabus will also have course goals, and it may be helpful to review those goals when determining the purpose. From there, determine what kind of research paper you're writing.
Argumentative
The goal of an argumentative research paper is to establish a position on a topic and persuade your audience to adopt the presented view. For this kind of research paper, you would be looking for information that is for, or against, your topic or pros and cons.
Analytical
The goal of an analytical research paper is to explore the topic through a neutral stance, or without bias. The research and information presented will present the writer with a conclusion to present to their audience without persuading the audience into any particular way of thinking. The information you would be looking for for an analytical research paper would be strictly fact based to create a well-supported analysis.
What are the most important words in your topic statement or thesis?
Searching databases or the OCC Library catalog isn't like searching Google or other search engines. Search engines use natural language searching. Natural language searching allows you to speak or type everyday language, sentences, or questions into the search bar to create a query.
Keyword searching only requires you to isolate the most important concepts of your topic and search individual words, phrases, and their synonyms. In keyword searching, you seperate your words and phrases using boolean operators to produce more focused results.
For example:
Natural Word Search: What happened in the 1975 World Series?
Keyword Search: world series AND baseball AND 1975
Boolean operators are words and symbols that are used in conjunction with keywords to narrow or broaden search queries. Those boolean operators include: AND, OR, or NOT and the symbols quotation marks "", parenthesis (), and asterisk *.
AND:
The area of the venn diagram where the star is located represents the results that include ALL of the search terms. Notice this area of the diagram is the narrowest part of the whole diagram.
OR:
Results for this query will include any of those search terms. This is a good strategy to use if you don't know what language, or jargon, to use to get an idea of what research is out there.
NOT:
In the below example, we want to know about Psychology, but NOT adolescent psychology. The results for this query will not include anything about adolescent psychology, but will include other types of psychology.
Symbols:
Quotation Marks " " - By putting quotation marks around phrases you are telling the database to look for the whole phrase. This is helpful when searching phrases that contain common words that when separate do not pertain to your topic.
For example: Putting quotation marks around "skin cancer" will ensure that you are searching for skin cancer and will only produce results with that phrase. Otherwise, you will get results that include the keywords skin AND cancer, which may not include results for skin cancer. This is called phrase searching.
Parenthesis () - Parenthesis are used to enclose different search strategies in one query. The database will search what is in the parenthesis first and then apply the statements that are not enclosed.
For example: (first world war OR great war) AND allies
Asterisk * - By adding an asterisk to the end of a truncated, or shortened, word, you are actually searching all forms of that word. This helps to broaden your search. This technique is called truncation.
For example:
BEWARE - Some words do not truncate well and you may get more results than you mean to.In this case, it is better to spell out what you are looking for and use the operator OR to broaden your search.
For example: mat* could include = mating, maternity, matrix, math, material, matriculating, matrimony. Instead search (mate OR mating OR pairing)