 Hi, my name is Hannah Schmellen and I am a librarian at Ohio University Libraries. This video covers strategies and efficiencies when searching for your topic. This video will describe search strategy techniques and efficiencies, including billion search terms, identifying main concepts, and choosing appropriate places to search, and help you to transition your research topic into a search strategy. First, let's start with an example topic. In infants born prematurely, what are the subsequent lifetime prevalence and effects of hearing problems? Even if you are not to the point of a written research question or it's formatted differently than the one you see here, your first step is to identify your main concepts. What ideas are really the most important to your topic? In this case, they are infant, premature, and hearing problems. Notice I didn't identify the word effect or prevalence. I did not choose these words because outside of the context of my question, they are meaningless. Can you imagine how many books, articles, and research exist with the word effects? Basically, everyone published. So choose your main concepts wisely. In this table, I have parsed out the main concepts of the example topic above. Next in the other column, you will see mesh slash synonyms as the heading. What is this? This column is, I dedicate to alternative terms to your main concept. This could be synonyms you come up with or words you see in an article or official subject headings from a database. Mesh stands for medical subject headings and are official terms assigned to articles in the database PubMed. And they help PubMed to identify articles you want based on what you're typed in. Other library research databases have their own subject headings, and if you would like to learn more about these, reach out to your subject librarian or peruse our subject guides on the library's homepage. Okay, back to the table. You will know a variety of alternative terms. For example, infant is one of my main concepts, and I have identified infant comma very low birth weight, which is a subject heading in PubMed, a mesh term, newborn, baby, child, etc. These are all alternative ways to describe the concept of infant. So why are alternative terms important? Adding alternative terms like subject headings or synonyms increase your likelihood of getting more relevant and inclusive results. If one author uses the word baby and another author uses the word newborn, and both of those articles are talking about hearing problems in premature babies, you want to read them both. One using the word newborn or baby or infant doesn't really matter. The context is the same. So alternative spellings, words, and context is all really important when you're considering how you're searching and what words you use. Search strategy is next, and is how you will string your main concepts, subject headings, and synonyms together to search a library research database, or Google, or really any search engine you use. Here you'll see an example of a search strategy based on my sample topic. In parentheses, I have infant or newborn or baby. This tells the database that any of these terms will do. Infant or baby, same thing. Next, I have and premature, and instructs the database that the word premature must be in the results of my articles. The last portion is and, parentheses, quotation mark, hearing problems, quotation mark, or deaf, asterisk, parentheses. Hearing problems or deaf are synonyms. So they are, or, if you will, together. Hearing problems is in quotation marks because I want the database to keep these words together as a phrase, and to not split them apart. Premature babies all have possible problems that could be hearing problems, growth problems, etc. But I'm looking specifically at hearing problems, which is why those two terms together and deafness is an example, which leads me to the star or asterisk after the word deaf in my search strategy. That instructs the database to add all possible endings to that word, hence deaf or deafness is going to automatically be searched by the database. If you have any questions about this, librarians are great at building search strategies, and we are more than happy to help. We do this all the time. Okay, so we've discussed breaking down your topic into concepts. The importance of gathering alternative terms such as synonyms and subject headings. We've talked about search strategies, and now I'm going to talk about choosing the right place to search and give you some examples. Given that our topic was health related, listed our relevant library database options. Subject specific databases can lead you to more relevant resources quicker. All of these databases and more can be accessed through the library's main page, and I will show you where that is shortly. The databases that I have listed are PubMed, which I've mentioned before, TRIP, Cochrane Library and Clinical Key, which all have a health and medicine focused. Allied Health, we have SINOL, our ProQuest Nursing. If you're looking for more biology or genetic component or general sciences overall, Scopus is a great place to search. And of course, PubMed. A great place to search for psychology related articles would be Psych Info. And honestly, if you have any questions at all, ask a librarian. So how do I get to these library databases? You start the library's homepage. You can drop down out of articles plus to databases and then type in one of the databases I listed, or one of the databases you are suggested from your librarian. You click connect, and you search.