Asking and Answering the Research Question [Part 1]
Channel: The University of Notre Dame Australia
Date: 20/08/2014

How to translate your research question into a search in order to find scholarly articles on a topic.

Hello and welcome.

Today I’m going to take you through how to prepare a search in order to find scholarly articles on a topic. Before you even start searching it’s important to understand what you are trying to find; and, more importantly, how to translate your research question into terms that a computer can understand. 

Lets start out with our research question. Lets say that I want to find information on the effectiveness of food literacy programs for high school students. The first thing I have to do is to write this out in the form of a question – What is the effect of food literacy programs on the BMI of high school students? 

The next thing I have to do is analyse the relevant parts of my question. The relevant parts of my question are food literacy, BMI and high school students. Then I have to define the parts of my question. What I call food literacy is really just jargon that represents the idea of food choices and their impact on health so lets find some similar words that describe the concept of food literacy. 

Here are some words that describe my concept: food literacy, food education programs, healthy eating behaviors, food preparation and nutritional education.  These all describe the ideas behind food literacy and will pick up some relevant articles. My next concept to look at is high school students. There are other words to describe this group including teenagers, adolescents, secondary school students. BMI is quite a specific idea and almost a university description, but we have included BMI and body mass index to cover both ways this could be described in the literature. 

Now that we have some synonyms we can start structuring a search. We are going to place all the similar terms together within brackets, and then join the groups of terms together. 

This is concept 1 - Food literacy OR health eating behavior OR nutritional education. It contains the words that describe the concept of food literacy, but broadened out to include the words nutritional education or healthy eating behavior because essentially this is what the concept of food literacy is describing. 

Concept 2 is about high school students. We could also describe this group as teenagers or adolescents, so we have gathered these words together in brackets as well. 

Concept 3 is about BMI, both as an acronym and fully spelled out. 

We come to our final search string: 

(“Food literacy” OR “Health eating behavior” OR “Nutritional education”) AND (“High school” OR Teenager* OR Adolescen*) AND (BMI OR “body mass index”)

You’ll see that each word or phrase is separated by the word OR in capital letters. This is a command saying to the database as long as you find this word or this one, or this one in the brackets, that’s okay, because they all describe the same thing. You’ll also see that each group of brackets is connected together by the word AND. This means we are saying to the database that while we don’t mind which word that it finds within the brackets, it must find at least one of the terms in the brackets together in the search results. We’ve put terms of more than one word in quotes because then they’ll be searched as a phrase with both words together instead of being searched separately. Phrases such as “food literacy” or “healthy eating behavior” are examples.

We’ve also added the asterisk symbol to words such as adolescents so the database will pick up adolescent or adolescents; same with teenager or teenagers.  

Now that we have constructed a good search all we have to do is to apply it to an article database. We can do this by simply cutting and pasting this search string into a database such as Summon, CINAHL, PubMed or Google Scholar. We will cover this and how to refine our search in the next video.