How do we go about searching a library database? Our first step is to create our research question.  How do we come up with a research question that would be good for our assignment and for searching in library databases? 

• The first place to look is in the assignment provided by your professor.  Sometimes your assignment will be very specific, giving you your research question.  Sometimes the assignment will provide purposefully vague instructions for the assignment and except you to fill in the details. 
• Your topic should be something you are interested in. You will likely be spending a lot of time with this question and topic and so you need to make sure that it is something that is not going to become tiresome or tedious.
• The topic should also be something you think other people would be interested in. Or something you can convince people to become interested in through your research.  What makes your topic different from what other people have already said?
• Lastly, does your research question lead to a one source ‘answer’?  Good research questions will force you to search for multiple sources to use in forming your own original response.  Yes or No questions are not good for library databases.  (When did Edgar Allan Poe write “The Black Cat”, is a bad question for an academic research question.)

Now that we have our research question, we can start figuring out which terms will be most useful for our search.  There are a few big differences between searches we are used to performing in Google or Bing, and searches in one of our library databases.

This biggest difference starts with what we put in the search box.  When we use a search engine, we enter our complete thought into the search box: "How does the narrator in "The Black Cat" foreshadow the modern psychopath?"  You will get lots of results with this search, but few of the returns you find on the Internet could be used in academic research, and you will spend a lot of time determining what you can use and what you cannot.

However, when we get ready to search Library databases, we cannot put our complete thought into the search box.  If we tried to use the same search in a library database that we did in Google, we would not get any results.  We will have to find the most important parts of our research question to narrow down our search.

When trying to find the most important parts of a research question, it's helpful to think about social media. If you created a video, meme, or post about your topic that you wanted to post on your favorite social media platform, your research question would be your title.  You would also throw in some hashtags to make sure as many people as possible found your post. You are going to be doing the same thing to find the terms to use for a library database search. For our Poe example we could use:

Edgar Allan Poe

The Black Cat

psychopath

If you do not get a lot of results with a library search, we have been taught to keep putting more information into our search.  With a library database, if at first you do not get a lot of results instead of adding more words to your search, try new words.  If you try to keep adding more words to your search you will quickly be left with no results. 

Instead, try changing out some of the terms you used for ones that are similar.  Just like we would not just use one hashtag when posting on social media, we want to make sure that we have multiple words for each of our main concepts.  By using multiple terms, we make sure that we find all the information in the database that might help us with our research question.  When performing literary criticism, at least one of your terms will be the title of the work or the author’s name.  A good way to start your search is to combine those two terms and see what is out there!