Search Skills and Strategies

This weeks learning objective was focused on search skills and strategies that can help students enhance their search outcome. All college students are normally expected to conduct academic research over various academic subjects, and finding the right resources is crucial to be successful in those research assignments.

There are many tips that can help students when using online search engines to look up resources and information. One important tip is that students should search by entering specific keywords and phrases that are related to the topic and use quotation marks to focus on the topic and limit the search results. Also, students should use advanced search options and limitations to help generate a specific type of results (ex. Only search for articles that were published in the last tow years about the topic). This will generate a more relevant and focused search results. In addition, it might be helpful to use more than one search engine or use the meta-search engines which collect search results from all major search engines and project them in one place.

In addition to using online search engines, students should utilize the universities library system and the services it provides. It usually contains a large number of scholarly material that can be accessed online, or sent physically or electronically to the student if needed. This resource can be very helpful for students when working on academic research papers because it provides a large database of reliable academic material.