RESEARCH FOUNDATIONS
5 Practical Search Strategies
Kathleen DeLaurenti and Andrea I. Copland
Searching
Now we’re ready to search. To decide where to start, look at your research mind map and decide what kinds of sources will help answer your questions. As a reminder, these can include:
- Primary sources: diaries, autobiographies, archival manuscripts, news reports, social media
- Secondary sources: scholarly books and articles that demonstrate applications of specific methodologies or frameworks related to your questions
- Tertiary sources: subject-specific encyclopedias and indexes to help you expand your background knowledge in areas related to your topic
Once you know specifically what kinds of information sources to look for, you can map them to the search tools we discussed. One way to do this is to build a search tool planner to map which search tools you want to use and how to prioritize them. An example is provided below in Table 5-1.
| Type of Source | Information Resources | Search Tool 1 | Search Tool 2 |
| Primary | Diaries | Local library catalog | WorldCat |
| Archival manuscript | Archival collections | ||
| Newspaper reports | Newspaper database | Music Index | |
| Secondary | Scholarly article or ethnographic studies | Multidisciplinary database (e.g., JSTOR) | Google Scholar |
| Scholarly article or musical analyses | RILM | ||
| Tertiary | Encyclopedia of folktales | Local library catalog |
5-1. Dig Deeper
Turning Mind Maps into Searches
Once you’ve chosen a search tool to start with, pull together your search tool planner and research mind map to start your search.
Here are some tips and tricks to maximize using your search terms effectively. Remember, a library catalog is not going to be good at answering your questions directly. You may need to do some translating to get effective results.
Search Operators
Table 5-2 below shares some common ways to use syntax, or grammatical operators, to make your searches more precise.
| Operator | Function | Result | Example |
| AND | Used between terms, it requires the search tool to include both terms. | Narrows your search | myth AND music |
| OR | Used between terms, it requires the search tool to treat the terms as synonyms. | Expands your search | folk tale OR myth |
| NOT | Used before a term, it excludes results that use that term. (Note: Instead of NOT, you must use a – [minus sign] in Google.) | Increases precision of your search | folk tale NOT myth folk tale -myth |
| ” “ | Used to enclose a phrase, it tells the search engine to search multiple words as one word. | Narrows your search | “folktale” |
| * | Use the asterisk as a wild card. | Expands your search | myth* for myth, myths, mythological |
Google-specific Search Operators
Table 5.3 below highlights Google-specific operators to make your searches more precise.
| Operator | Function | Result | Example |
|
define: |
Before a term, provides a definition with a source | Provides definitions | define: myth |
|
site: |
Before a web address, returns results only from that website. | Limits what sites Google searches | site:loc.gov |
|
filetype: |
Before a filetype extension, returns only results of that filetype. | Limits the kinds of results by filetype | filetype:pdf |
|
before: |
Used with a YYYY-MM-DD format, limits results to before a specific date. | Limits results by timeframe | before:2020-07-01 |
|
after: |
Used with a YYYY-MM-DD format, limits results to after a specific date. | Limits results by timeframe | after: 1999-01-01 |
Formulating a Good Search
Hyo-Eun wants to test whether using search operators will help. Starting at WorldCat, she types:
(“folk tale” OR folktale) AND korea AND music
By including both possible ways to spell folktale, she added about 100 possible results to her search. But because her search was precise, she only has 129 results to evaluate. Hyo-Eun and Luis used this approach to begin identifying sources about the Dominican, Nigerian, Portuguese, and French cultures connected to their project.
Luis was especially excited to learn that Google and other search engines can use these operators, too. Because he’s especially interested in identifying where archival collections might be located, he decides to start looking for them. Luis starts with the following search:
archive korea music site:*.edu
The asterisk in a site search tells Google to search for any website ending in .edu that might have archives about Korean music. These search operators produce a targeted Google results list with few advertisements.
These initial stages of research might seem time-consuming. As you become more proficient in specific areas of research-creation practices, your pre-search preparation will get faster. You’ll develop your own workflow for identifying information needs, developing mind maps, and using the right search approaches in the search tools you choose. Over time, you will also become acquainted with the keywords commonly used in databases for particular ideas or concepts where you gain expertise. These terms can become foundational in your ongoing research and contribute to developing a structured and sustainable approach to your career. By deconstructing your search into methodical steps, you will also construct a sustainable research process that will become increasingly familiar as you gain experience, enabling you to work more efficiently and precisely in your efforts.
5-2. Dig Deeper
Practice using search operators and terms from your mind map.
- Formulate a search in WorldCat using search operators in Table 5-2. Search Operators. How well do the search results match the ideas in your mind map?
- Formulate a search in Google Scholar using search operators in Table 5-3. Google-specific Search Operators. How well do the search results match the ideas in your mind map?
Establishing Relevance
A challenge in modern research, given the abundance of available sources, is the tendency to stray from our planned resources, like making impromptu purchases during a trip to a large grocery store. While shopping, you might be enticed to buy items not on your list. Despite envisioning elaborate dishes to cook over the next few days, your hectic schedule leads to spoiled vegetables in the fridge.
Similarly, when confronted with numerous research results, the temptation to set aside seemingly relevant but slightly off-topic materials can be strong. It is imperative to cultivate efficient reading habits when engaging with your resources to counteract this.
When researching a scholarly journal article, expert readers almost never read an article front to back. In fact, people have written journal articles advocating for this seemingly strange practice![1] Different academic disciplines have different approaches, but the most common recommendation is to read the title, abstract, and subject terms (if available) to make your first determination of relevance. If you think you’re trying to put a square scholarly source into a round peg, put it aside and move on. Your time is precious!
Next, read the introduction and conclusion. Sometimes you’ll find that after reading these typically short sections, your understanding changes. You might put this resource back on the shelf and move on.
Your next areas of focus will vary based on the specific topic or academic discipline. For instance, humanities papers often lack clear methodology or results sections because these fields typically don’t involve formal experiments. They generally describe a specific theoretical framework that they will use to analyze primary sources. By contrast, in the field of natural sciences, research papers usually include well-defined methodology and results sections due to the empirical nature of the discipline.
If you’re exploring research in a different field, examining these aspects of a resource will enhance your comprehension of its relevance. If you are still considering a resource after reading the methodology section, it’s advisable to keep this source for future reference.
Deep reading is the final step in which you comprehensively review how your findings fit together. The next section guides you on how to maximize your deep reading to synthesize the resources you gathered.
How do these strategies translate into reading a book? With books, it can be more difficult because we may have to decide to get access to a print copy of a book before we determine its relevance to our research process. Google Books can be a good support tool in this case. You might not start your search there, but you can look at a preview of a book by reviewing the table of contents or the index. Found in back of a book, book indexes are an important tool in deciding if a book is relevant to your research. If the terms you’re interested are not listed in the index or seldom appear in the text, you do not need to spend more time with that book. Back on the shelf it goes!
Evaluating Sources
Assessing a source’s relevance is just the beginning of source evaluation. To ascertain whether a source effectively supports your creative research, your next move involves analyzing it within scholarly discourse. This will help you grasp the underlying elements of the source, such as the individuals involved, the subject matter, the location, and the reasons behind a scholarly article, blog, sound recording, or other form of evidence.
Methods for Evaluating Sources
Librarians have been devising ways to help researchers evaluate sources since the online information boom of the early 2000s. These tools not only help you find sources that are accurate, relevant, and authoritative, but they can also help ensure that the evidence you are using provides multiple perspectives. Exploring evidence from authors who bring different experiences and expertise ensures that more inclusive practices end up in your work.
Traditional knowledge systems do more than impact the way that we organize information or how we build archival collections. These systems also impact which scholars have their voices and perspectives amplified through traditional information sources in the information life cycle. Several projects, notably Women Also Know Stuff, Cite Black Authors, and People of Color Also Know Stuff, have been established to help amplify voices of scholars who may not be as visible in your search process.
There are many acronyms to help you remember important criteria for evaluating a source. We recommend the ACT UP method devised by librarian Dawn Stahura. ACT UP not only helps researchers think about the who, when, and why of an information source, but also opens a pathway to contextualize those questions within institutional systems that can sometimes privilege certain voices or perspectives.[2]
| ACT UP | Description |
| Author | Who wrote the resource?
Who are they? Background information matters. |
| Currency | When was this resource written?
When was it published? Does this resource fit into the currency of your topic? |
| Truth | How accurate is this information?
Can you verify any of the claims in other sources? Does it include typos and spelling mistakes? |
| Unbiased | Is the information presented to sway the audience to a particular point of view?
Resources should be impartial unless otherwise stated. |
| Privilege | Check the privilege of the author(s).
Are they the only folks who might write or publish on this topic? Who’s missing in this conversation? Critically evaluate the subject terms associated with each resource you found. How are they described? What are the inherent biases? |
A significant yet overlooked part of the ACT UP method lies in the UP. We often assume that “unbiased” means having no point of view, but research can include limitations and conclusions. Those conclusions may not always be accurate.
- Does a resource explicitly contextualize what it can and cannot achieve within the scope of the book or article?
- Does it use language that tries to convince a reader of a particular perspective?
Privilege is also something that scholars have not always considered when evaluating information sources. Understanding who an author is and what privilege they possess within the context of the source—whether it’s a newspaper article or a scholarly article—can help you identify inherent or sometimes invisible bias. Stahura hopes that by “poking holes in scholarly resources” we can “shift the research paradigm to make room for other voices”[3] in our research-creation work.
Understanding the voices represented in the evidence you use is crucial for creative researchers. If you aim to be a citizen-artist engaged with your community, it’s important to create work with local community members, not just for them.
5-3. Dig Deeper
Evaluate a source for inclusion in your research-creation.
Use the ACT UP framework worksheet to evaluate a source that you discovered searching WorldCat or Google Scholar.
Resources as Time Machines
Google serves as a vast resource hub. It offers two notable tools for exploring research. First is Google Books, which helps you search within books and access them in your local library. Second is Google Scholar and its Related articles and Cited by tools to help you stay on topic in your research.
These two features of Google Scholar allow you collect resources on your topic with a single search. This allows you to leverage a single source to search forward and backwards in time in the scholarly record. This helps you collect additional resources that are more likely to be related to your research question without having to have the perfect search terms.
When you find a scholarly article, start by copying its citation into Google Scholar. Below your citation, you’ll typically find several link options. The first essential link is the Related articles link. This feature displays research that Google Scholar identifies as related to your chosen article.
The second link, the Cited by link, offers valuable insights. It reveals the number of authors who cited the article, providing a gauge of its significance among scholars. This information can help you assess the article’s impact. Additionally, clicking on Cited by link leads to all of the articles indexed in Google Scholar that cite your article, offering a glimpse into future scholarly discussions and applications of the research.
When you keep finding the same articles, you know that you’ve found the literature that established scholars include in their own work. It’s good to know which resources researchers hold up as important work in an area of inquiry. However, especially in some areas of music and humanities, it is important to recognize that this practice has made some voices dominant in the scholarship. Scholars who seek other paths of inquiry may be harder to find when we have access to so much information. Just because a scholarly article is not cited many times does not mean the scholarship is not valid. A scholarly article’s low citation count doesn’t invalidate its scholarship. If it aligns with your research and meets evaluation criteria, include it in your work.
Organizing Your Research
Once you feel confident leaving some research resources behind, your next step is to make a plan for organizing your resources so that you can access everything you need during your writing process. Earlier in this book, research was compared to grocery shopping. Organizing your research pantry is an important part of your process, but too many people leave this task for the very last step.
Research is iterative. Staying organized can make each iteration as efficient and specific as possible while keeping you focused. This is critical to helping you avoid unintentionally expanding your topic too much or collecting so many irrelevant sources that you struggle to sort through them.
Keeping Track of What You Already Have
Sometimes when you shop, you might purchase a loaf of bread, only to come home and find that you already had one in your pantry. One way to avoid repeating your research is to put everything in one place as you go. We highly recommend using a citation manager, such as Zotero or RefWorks, to keep everything together and make collaboration easier.
Zotero is free to use. This open source application is maintained by a nonprofit organization that creates tools to improve research for those working in the humanities. What sets Zotero apart from other tools is how it interacts with both scholarly and nonscholarly content. For nonscholarly content, such as websites or blogs, Zotero saves a copy of the website from the day you collected it. That means that any time you cite this website, you can reference exactly what was on that webpage the day you saved it (even the ads). This can be very important in a digital age where edits or corrections can happen, or websites can even disappear!
Zotero also a useful tool for saving things about you. Consider creating an “About Me” collection in a citation manager. This is a great tool for organizing press and reporting about your performing and creative research endeavors. You can save every newspaper, magazine, and online interview online exactly as it appeared on publication day. This allows you to keep track of how the world is talking about you and your work as well as saving other research for your projects.
For scholarly articles or books available in a PDF format, citation managers save both the metadata about that item and the file itself. You can then annotate that file, create tags across your research, and make notes that become fully searchable. This keeps all your work in a single place to access throughout your research process. This cross-indexing is helpful when you need to remember why a source was important when you saved it or details from your deep reading.
Lastly, many citation managers also function as a plugin that work within most word processors, including Microsoft Word and Google Docs. In addition to automatically adding citations during your initial drafts, the plugin can create a bibliography in your chosen citation style––Chicago, APA, Harvard, etc. Instead of spending time looking up where periods go or if the year should follow the author’s name, the citation manager does it all and saves valuable time.
As musician-scholars transition from students to professionals, it’s important to reimagine the tools you used in a classroom for your professional research-creation projects. In Chapter 1: What Is Research? you learned about the different ways research is a part of all facets of your creative process. Citation managers can add value and efficiency to any research project you approach using any of the four research-creation modalities. Use them for grant proposals, news articles or blog posts, or even program notes. You might not make those citations available to your audience in your final format, but the work is documented if any questions arise later.
Managing your citations is also not simply for writing scholarly articles or books. It is critical to save all of the resources you used as evidence no matter what research-creation modality you were working in. We’ve explored the ways that you integrate research into your artistic practice, and as these practices evolve, you will collect many resources for your research-creation processes. You may compile resources to produce a performance, understand repertoire, or write a grant narrative. Creating a personal archive of your research resources helps you leverage connections across research projects in your own work.
“When writing program notes for the Seattle Symphony, my initial drafts contain citations for every fact. Although I strip out the citations in subsequent drafts, those citations not only ensure truth and accuracy but also allow me to answer any questions that my editors might ask. I can point to measures in a score or manuscript and the composer’s letters, and buttress my writing with ear-witness accounts, books, recordings, and scholarly journal articles. Synthesizing a variety of sources enables me to share interesting and unexpected connections with the general reader.
“For example, in a concert featuring Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and The Tale of Tsar Saltan Suite by Rimsky-Korsakov, I noted that the first opera Shostakovich saw was The Tale of Tsar Saltan. He liked it but worried that learning music would be ‘too hard to grasp.’ But there is another connection. Rimsky-Korsakov gave the manuscript of the suite from Tsar Saltan as a graduation gift to his pupil, Igor Stravinsky.” Christopher DeLaurenti, composer and music journalist
Additional Organizational Tools
There are other tools you might want to consider adding to your research process at this point. One downside to citation managers is that it can be difficult to have a full map of your notes and tags. While tagging and adding notes can help you summarize and organize, synthesizing your information gathering to use as evidence can be more cumbersome.
You might consider developing a tool or matrix that contains your notes and tags in one spreadsheet. This can help you find patterns and synthesize information from your compiled research resources. It’s up to you how to organize your matrix, but one approach is to list all your sources by date and include the author and title in their own columns. Depending on the scope of your inquiry, you’ll likely have a mix of scholarly and nonscholarly sources. Additional columns could include themes, methodologies, or important notes from results and conclusions.
If you want to use a template, consider this literature review template that lets you list, organize, and synthesize ideas from your research-creation work.
The notes you take and the initial coding in your matrix act as summaries of what you’ve curated. The next step is synthesizing this information, pulling together data from multiple sources to make larger points in your work.[4] As you build your matrix and start to synthesize the information, you’ll be better able to sort this information in a variety of ways and begin to identify patterns.
Building a research matrix can also help you see holes in your resource gathering. Now, after doing deep reading and organizing the resources you collected, you can be even more specific in additional searches to fill those gaps or answer those additional questions.
The research process we set up, from locating the kinds of resources you need along the information life cycle to searching with a specific search tool, may seem like a straight line. However, at any point in your research process, you may need to go back and repeat a step or even start over in a new direction. When you have an efficient, strategic process for gathering resources, these detours are not intimidating. By building a solid research process, you can focus on following your curiosity instead of worrying about deadlines.
Conclusion
The journey of research is a multifaceted process that requires meticulous planning, strategic searching, and critical evaluation. By carefully determining the types of sources you need, whether primary, secondary, or tertiary, you lay a strong foundation for effective research. Utilizing mind maps to translate your research questions into a coherent search strategy, and employing precise search operators, can significantly enhance the efficiency and relevance of your searches. It is essential to engage with sources critically, using tools like the ACT UP method to assess their reliability and relevance, ensuring a well-rounded and inclusive approach to your research. Organizing your findings with citation managers not only keeps your research process streamlined but also prepares you for effective synthesis of information. This approach allows you to identify key patterns, fill in gaps, and make connections that are essential for drawing insightful conclusions. As you navigate the complexities of research, remember that this iterative process is a journey of discovery, where flexibility and a willingness to refine your strategies can lead to profound insights and contributions to your field.
Key Takeaways
Map out which search tools (e.g., library catalogs, databases) to use for finding different types of primary, secondary, and tertiary sources. Prioritize these tools based on your research needs.
Convert your research mind map into a structured search strategy. This involves selecting search terms and deciding which search tools to start with.
Using citation managers like Zotero or RefWorks to organize your sources. Use literature review templates to track themes and ideas that emerge in your research-creation. Organizing as you go prevents duplication and keeps your research focused.
Use reading strategies and the ACT UP method (Author, Currency, Truth, Unbiased, Privilege) to assess the reliability, relevance, and bias of sources. This ensures the use of high-quality and diverse perspectives in your research.
Be prepared to refine and repeat search strategies as new information and insights emerge. Effective research often involves revisiting and revising initial plans.
Media Attributions
- Music Research concept © Peabody Institute is licensed under a CC BY (Attribution) license
- Breaking Down Your Research Project © Peabody Institute is licensed under a CC BY (Attribution) license
- V M Subramanyam, “Art of Reading a Journal Article: Methodically and Effectively,” Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology 17, no. 1 (2013): 65–70. ↵
- Stahura, Dawn. “ACT UP for Evaluating Sources: Pushing against Privilege. Stahura College & Research Libraries News,” November 8, 2018. https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.79.10.551. ↵
- Stahura ↵
- “Synthesizing Sources - Purdue OWL® - Purdue University.” Accessed July 6, 2023. https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/conducting_research/research_overview/synthesizing_sources.html. ↵
an information source that provides information as close as possible to first-hand from when an event of phenomenon happened
an information source, typically a scholarly book or scholarly article, that analyzes primary sources or empirical data
an information source that summarizes secondary research to provide overviews of a topic; tertiary sources written for scholarly use are generally organized by discipline or topic
a diagram used to visually organize information into a hierarchy, showing relationships among pieces of the whole; It is often created around a single concept, drawn as an image in the center of a blank page, to which associated representations of ideas such as images, words and parts of words are added.
research that includes performative or non-text creative aspects as the result, motivation, or methodology for the research itself (see Chapman and Sawchuck)
an article published in a scholarly journal that has been peer-reviewed; also often called a peer-reviewed or academic article
a software tool that helps you collect, manage, and cite resources for your research-creation projects