How to search for papers

When trying to write up a report you can easily spend hours scouring the internet for the paper you are looking for, so we’ve come up with a guide full of tips for searching for research papers to make it that bit easier!

Firstly, I would always start by trying to find a good review paper on the topic you are researching. Look for recent publications to make sure they cover a lot of the subject and there haven’t been loads of new studies since it was written! You can then read good summaries of each one, and click through the reference list to read in more detail!

Google Scholar is often one of the fastest reporters of articles, as sometimes other databases can take years to include papers! You want to get up-to-date research as much as you can, so Google Scholar is an incredible place to look.

When searching databases it is important to limit your search using key words or phrases which relate to the information you are looking for. If you have already found some papers but are looking for more on a similar topic you can often find helpful phrases in these papers. It is good practice to also try alternative words like synonyms or spelling variations.

I would recommend looking into Boolean Operators. This sounds complicated but they really aren’t and are such a good tool! I have explained the main three operators below as well as some additional operators which you can play around with in searches.

• “and” operator – if your search returns too many results then add “and” between search terms to make sure that both words either side of the “and” have to be included in the results. For example “flower and yellow” would return any flowers that were yellow.
• “not” operator – you can eliminate a word from the results by writing “not” before it. For example “flower not yellow” would return any colour flowers apart from yellow.
• “or” – to search for records that include one of multiple alternative search terms you would write “or” between them. For example “vehicle or car” would return any result that includes either the word vehicle or the word car.
• “near” or “next” operator – proximity searching allows you to search for two terms, and make sure they are near each other in the results. For example, if you are wanting to know about red cars, searching “red and car” might return something like “red houses and blue cars” which isn’t what you are looking for. Using proximity searching through “red near car” might give you “red cars and yellow houses”, which is what you are wanting. The operator ensures that the two terms you search for are close to each other in the results.
• “*” truncation operator – this allows you to search for all variants of a term without having to write them all out, including singular and plural forms of a word. For example “flower*” would search for both “flower” and “flowers”. However it also searches for any word beginning with what you type out. If you write “car*” you would get “car” and “cars”, but also words such as “carbohydrate” and “carrousel”, which are probably less relevant to what you are searching for! If you are just hoping to get the singular and plural of a word it could be easier to just list them in an “or” statement.
• “*” wildcard operator – yes, confusingly there are two which are written as stars (this can change between the syntax used by different databases)! The wildcard operators are similar to truncation, however they allow for variation in a character within the middle of a word. This is especially helpful for differences in spelling, such as with “grey” and “gray”. Here you can type them both out with the “or” operator, but instead you can just type “gr*y”, which is so much quicker!

Photo by Matt Marriott

Once you have mastered the Boolean Operators individually, you can also link them all together to create strings (I know, we’re getting a bit too computery now, but bear with me!). Strings just allow you to combine the operators into your search. Here it is important to use parenthesis (brackets). For example, we are still looking for our yellow flower. We decided to use the “or” operator rather than truncation, so we are going with “flower or flowers” rather than “flower*”. Then, we want to make sure that the word “yellow” appears close in the results to the word “flower” or “flowers”, so that we know our results are relevant. So we type:

“yellow near flower or flowers”

However, there is a danger with this that the results will now either have “yellow” and “flower” near to each other, or that the result will contain the word “flowers”. This isn’t exactly what we wanted. Think back to maths lessons (I know I am sorry), and remember how we used brackets when putting calculations into a calculator so that it did some parts of it first (don’t worry if you don’t remember, I barely do (also sorry for so many brackets)). To make the string work perfectly we would use brackets in the following way:

“yellow near (flower or flowers)”

Now we finally have our yellow flower results and I can stop using brackets (you’re welcome).

Photo by Fran Anderson

Once you have found a paper that sounds interesting have a read through it to check that it is relevant to your topic. Check out our guide to reading research papers here. Once you know that it is useful to you, make sure that you save it somewhere! The number of times I have found the perfect paper and then lost it when shutting my laptop doesn’t bear thinking about…

I would recommend that you copy the link of where you found it onto the bottom of your document, along with the name of the paper and the author. This way if the journal or database where you found it the first time removes access for any reason then you can still search for it and find it elsewhere! I usually would actually just write out the full reference while I am there to save myself some time later on. There are multiple ways of writing a reference which you can find guidance on here.

When using the information you found in the paper into your article, it is important to think carefully about what you write. You should make sure to not copy someone else’s work, as this is plagiarism. If you need to say exactly what someone else said then make sure it is in speech marks with a reference directly after. Generally you won’t quote someone else in a research paper though, you would usually just reference the paper after saying why it is relevant to what you are discussing.

Make sure to think critically about the paper before writing it into your report. Are they motivated by an agenda which made them research this topic? Are there any biases or issues with their methodology? Make sure you think about these when searching for papers.

I hope this guide helps you when searching for papers on the internet. There are so many out there and so many places to look that it can easily be overwhelming, however now you have all the tools to find the perfect article. Good luck!