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Michigan State University

Graduate Psychology Research Guide

Guide for graduate psychology programs.

Developing a Research Question

Creating a Search Strategy

Developing Keywords

Developing a Search Strategy

  • Truncation 
    • looks for all the different endings of a word in a database, so you don’t have to include all the different endings to ensure you’re finding all the relevant literature. 
    • pregnan* = pregnant, pregnancy, pregnancies
  • Quotation Marks
    • Searches for phrases common to medical/nursing literature
    • “physical activity” = tells database to return articles where the two words appear next to each other 
      • physical activity (without quotations) tells the database to search for and return articles with physical anywhere in any article, activity anywhere in any article
    • must be established keyword phrase
    • do NOT do “physical activity and anxiety in high school students”
  • Boolean Operators 
    • AND 
      • Combines the different parts of your search

      • rural AND “type 1 diabetes” OR diabet* AND “self-management"  

    • OR
      • Use to combine similar keywords (synonyms) to search for all the words
      • “breast cancer” OR “breast neoplasm” 
      • cigarette OR cigar OR smoke OR smok* OR “smokless tobacco” OR vape OR vaping

Conducting a Literature Search