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ECON 373: Economic Development

This guide has resources specific for students taking ECON373.

Developing a Search Strategy

Brainstorming  Keywords

Always start by brainstorming keywords before doing the keyword search.  First, break the topic down into parts, then brainstorm synonyms, broader terms, and narrower terms for each concept.

For example if your research question was : How do costs for hypertension treatment compare to costs for hypertension prevention?

Concepts Synonyms, Broader Terms, Narrower Terms
costs  cost, money, financial
hypertension  hypertension, blood pressure, heart disease
treatment  treat, treatments, exercise, diet, "drug therapy"
prevention  prevent, preventive, prevents, wellness

 

If your topic includes a development issue, use terms for that issue in general as well as specific approaches you know of.  For the issue, you may also want to use terms for various aspects of the issue as well as the broader term.

Combining Keywords and Building the Search

Using AND & OR

  • Use AND to connect terms when you want BOTH terms present
    • Example: "land reform" AND Brazil
  • Use OR to connect terms when you want EITHER term – when you are using synonyms
    • Example: "land reform" OR "agrarian reform" OR "landless movement"
  • AND & OR Together – use PARENTHESES (or separate search boxes if a database provides those)
    • Example : ("land reform" OR "agrarian reform") AND (MST or "Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem-Terra") AND Pernambuco

Truncation

Truncation allows you to search for multiple forms of a word with one term.

Examples:

  • hospital* = hospital, hospitals, hospitalization...
  • insur* = insurance, insurer, insured.....

Beware of truncating too short - and getting irrelevant things, for example just cost* would include too many words and all would not be related what you are doing for this course such as costal or costume.