During and after your studies you will need information for different purposes. In this module you will learn how to set up successful search strategies to find information on your subject.
Before starting a (literature) search, you have to consider what exactly you are looking for and where you might find this information. If you are looking for the telephone number of the library service desk, you will certainly not find it in the library catalogue, but you will easily find it on the library website. However, if you are looking for general information on breeding horses, the catalogue is a good source to find encyclopedias or books dealing with this topic. In the Module on Information Sources you will find detailed information on different types of information sources and their characteristics.
Once you know what you are looking for and where you are going to look for it, you will have to decide whether you need to find as much as possible or just a few references. The amount of information you like to find determines how you are going to search for information or, in other words, what your search strategy should be.
Different search strategies exist of which four are named here:
- Locating known publications
- Simple search - quick and dirty
- Complicated search - building a search strategy
- Following a thread
Which search strategy to use depends largely on the phase of the searching process. Probably, you will start with a "quick and dirty" search, followed by a more complicated search, and if you find some highly relevant articles, you will use these to find related articles.