Search techniques

Once you have your keywords and related search terms, you need to combine them in order to do your search. Below you can read more about combining search terms with OR and AND, as well as truncation and phrase searching.

Combining search terms with OR

agile OR iterative method

• retrieves any of the search terms
• makes the search broader
• the more search terms you combine with OR the better you cover the research area

Combining search terms with AND

agile AND software development

• retrieves all of the concepts
• makes the search narrower

Phrase searching

"software development"

• searches the specific phrase
• excludes articles where the search terms aren't written in the exact same order or next to each other
• narrows the search

Truncation

cooperat* retrieves cooperate, cooperation, cooperative.

• put an asterisk after the word stem (*)
• searches for different word variations
• broadens the search

Search techniques in databases

To be able to search more efficient and get a relevant search result it is important to understand how the databases interpret your search terms and how you can combine them. 

Combine search techniques

Here is an example of how we can combine our search terms / keywords in the Libsearch database. The picture illustrates how we transfer our keywords to the database search field.