Open Research

Supporting Student Research.

This page includes a variety of tips, tools and templates for helping you guide your students through online research projects.

Finding the right search terms

Too often students come to us and claim they "can’t find anything" on their topic or they "can’t find anything good." Often it is because they do not have a search strategy with appropriate keywords. Last year a student told Tom that she was having difficulty finding sources on the Internet about movies in the 1920s. How could that be? Well, the keyword "movies" is not a particularly effective search keyword for information from the 1920s. People in the 1920s simply did not use the term "movies." Had the student done a little background reading on the 1920s in an encyclopedia before turning to Google, she likely would have come up with better keyword terms and phrases, such as "talking pictures," "talkies," or "silent films." The point is that it is a good idea to do some background reading and develop effective search terms before turning to a search engine.

Another important search strategy is to move both horizontally and vertically in the search process. The student in the paragraph above did not think of horizontal, related terms to movies, such as "films" or "pictures." There are also numerous times during the search process when moving vertically, either up or down, is needed. Broader terms (moving up) and narrower terms (moving down) can be used effectively to expand or contract a search.

Blank horizontal and vertical search chart

For instance, a student who searches for "World War II" will find that these keywords yield many general and broad World War II sites. To narrow the search, the student could add categorizing terms such as names of campaigns, battles, generals, political leaders, and the like, to the "World War II" search terms. In those instances when search terms are too limiting and search results are too few, a search can be expanded by using broader terms. To illustrate, the three top results in a Google search for "weather underground" have to do with weather and climate, not the radical activist student organization. Adding a broad term such as "1960s" to the keywords "weather underground" leads immediately to sites on the "hippie era" organization.

To help his students think both horizontally and vertically in the search process, Tom draws an inverted triangle on the board and has his students brainstorm related, broader, and narrower terms for various topics. It is linked below:

Research Journals

It is critical as students conduct research that they maintain a record of their search terms, sources, and thinking. Here are some tools to help. The first link is a Word document template for student research journals. Blogs and Wikis are also great tools for tracking research progress, and the next two links are two our pages discussing those tools.

The Many Flavors of Google Searching.

On our Google Search page you will find tutorials for several of Google's search engines, including Google Advanced Search, Google Scholar Search, and Google News Search.
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KnightCite citation generator.

For students just learning the citation process, correct citation can be remarkably difficult. This video tutorial demonstrates how to use a simple, online citation generator.
KnightCite citation generator