The Library can offer a wealth of resources, both in print and online to support your dissertation research. But, if you do not know how to search for these effectively you may be missing out on key materials.
The key points to remember are:
The Library and Study Advice have a series of guides to help you develop effective search strategies - see the links below.
Our Study Advice team have put together a comprehensive guide to doing dissertations and major projects. It includes guidance on planning your dissertation, researching and doing a literature review, writing up and much more. There are also links to brief video tutorials on these topics.
The following example shows how a search topic ('the representation of women in fairy tales') can be broken down into keywords and grouped by concept. It shows how they relate to one other.
Concept 1 | AND | Concept 2 | AND | Concept 3 |
construction | femininity/feminine | fairy tales | ||
OR | OR | OR | ||
representation | women/woman | fables | ||
OR | OR | OR | ||
depiction | gender | folk tales |
Using these as a guide, you can begin to develop effective search strategies to find relevant materials for your research.