Skip to Main Content
Research Guides@Tufts

CH & SOC 0186: Health Policy in A Global Era

This guide is designed to support students in CH/SOC 0186: Health Policy in a Global Era

Keywords

Keywords are the building blocks of our searches.

The term "keywords" can also refer the core elements of your project - the important ideas, dates, places, figures, and theories that make up your argument and its context. These elements make excellent places to start with your search terms!

Making a list of search terms and keeping track of which ones you try can be a helpful way to keep track of your research in the beginning stages. Note: this list can also help you recreate your searches if you lose a source. When searching, it's often also helpful to think of the process like focusing an image -- you need to zoom in and out to find clarity. Don't be afraid to come up with related terms that are both more broad and more focused than your initial list.

The video below from Utah State University Library breaks down this process of developing search term keywords from project keywords in more detail and with visual aids.

Tips to Optimize Your Results

Limit or Expand Your Search: AND/OR/NOT (aka Boolean Search Operators)

AND

Use AND to focus search and combine different aspects of your topic.

Example: global warming AND agriculture
OR

Use OR to expand your search and find synonyms or related terms.

Example: global warming OR greenhouse effect
NOT

Use NOT to exclude a word or phrase from your search.

Example: hurricanes NOT North Carolina
Additional Search Tips

Phrase search  - Use quotation marks" " to search for a particular phrase.

Example:  "American sign language culture" holds the words together. Otherwise you risk finding books with sign as a word in the title, published by the American Popular Culture Association.

Truncation * - Use an asterisk to find variations of a word. Add an asterisk to the root of the word to find all variations of that word, including singular and plural.

Example: sex* finds sex, sexes, sexuality, etc.

Grouping/Nesting Keywords - Use parentheses ( ) to group all your search terms together.

Example:  ("self concept" or "body image") and "cerebral palsy"

Citation Chaining/Mining/Searching

In addition to searching in JumboSearch and in different databases on your own, another search strategy for finding resources utilizes the information that you gather through that searching. Nearly all scholarly sources, and many other reputable sources of information, will include Works Cited, Reference, or Bibliography pages (some will also include footnotes or endnotes). These are treasure troves of likely relevant resources to your topic. This method of searching, often referred to as citation chaining or citation mining, can also be useful for figuring out the prominent scholars in a particular field. Dissertations and theses can be excellent resources for citation mining because their bibliographies tend to be very thorough.

You can also do this to find more recently published resources by exploring what other resources have cited the resource you found. This can be done through Jumbo Search and Google Scholar's "Cited This" buttons or through databases like Web of Science.

Policy Search Tips

Many governments post policies online. In addition, think tanks and nonprofit advocacy organizations are great place for policy summaries as well. Below are some more specific search tips:

  • Using advanced search on Google Scholar when searching for policies in order to focus your results
  • Include phrases like "policy brief" in quotation marks along with relevant topic keywords
  • Use site (brainstorm likely sites or search likely ones such as the UN, WorldBank, Rand, Annenberg, etc.) or domain (.org, .gov., country domains) specific search in Google
  • Use filetype search to look specifically for PDFs in Google Scholar and Google
  • Search for essential terms in titles only

Below are several Tufts libraries research guides that have further tips for researching policy.

Health and Country Search Tips

When searching for any type of data, consider what level of detail you need to answer your question. Do you need statistics (summarized data), or do you need a dataset (the raw numbers used in analysis)? This can inform where you start your search. Overview information and statistics can often be found in journal articles, books, government websites, or reports from government or nonprofit organizations. Public datasets are likely to be found in data portals or data repositories, which can be hosted by governments, academic institutions, or nonprofits.

Government websites can be a good place to start looking for health and country information. But if you don't speak the same language as your chosen country, you can often find information from international organizations (like the UN, the OECD, or the World Health Organization).