COMM10000D Business Communications: Search Tips

Capitalization doesn't count, EXCEPT if you use AND, OR or NOT in your search, those words must be in capital letters, or they will be ignored, e.g.

• "global warming" OR "climate change"
• "social media" AND Canada

Enclose phrases in quotation marks, to keep the words together in the order you need, e.g.:

• "climate change"
• "social media"
• "human resources"
• "supply chain management"

Step One: Create and write your research question, example:

Should employees in Canada be given unlimited vacation time?

Step Two: Create your search, and focus on nouns (people, places or things) only. These will be your keywords or phrases - not who, why, where, when, how or what. (Check out the video on the left for more tips.)

1. employees  2. vacation 3. Canada

Step Three: Identify synonyms for each keyword or phrase. Remember to put any phrases in quotes, e.g..

You can find more synonyms or keywords using the Visual Thesaurus (see below) or Thesaurus.com .

Try adding an asterisk *  to the root of any word to pick up other variations of the word:

• Canad* will also find Canada, Canada's, Canadian
• work* will also retrieve workplace, workers, worked, working