CYBR 392 Cyber Society and Ethics

Searching Tips and Tricks

Selecting a database

A great place to start looking for research are the library's databases. These can be found from the library's home page under "Databases" (linked above).

1. On the Databases page, select the "All Subjects" drop-down menu option and then select the subject area that best fits the keywords for your topic area. There might be more that one subject that is applicable, so feel free to browse multiple subjects!
2. For example, if you are researching cybersecurity and legislation, you could look under "Computing" or "Law" or "Political Science." Each subject area will have a "Top Databases" section, although not all of the databases listed may fit your needs.
3. Look at the title and the short description for a database that looks promising. Once you've selected a database, use the keywords and other search strategies to perform a search. If the results don't look promising you can try altering your keywords, or try looking in a different database.

Identifying keywords

Keywords are the main ideas or concepts of a paper.

For example, if the research question is "What are the privacy and security issues associated with chatbots?", some possible keywords would be privacy, security, issues, and chatbots. You can also use words that would be synonyms such as confidentiality, safety, concerns, problems, surveillance, or virtual assistant. You can then combine these keywords with boolean operators (and, or, not) to search within the databases.

• AND is used to narrow a search by looking at only where both ideas are present.
• OR expands a search to include any of the ideas (usually used with synonyms.
• NOT is used to narrow a search by excluding an idea from the search.

Sample search (copy & paste into search bar):

Visual example of Boolean operators