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.
This playlist of two videos shows you how to prepare for and perform a literature search. The first video introduces literature searches and their role. The second video covers using the search operators AND and OR to create a search statement, and explains the role of wildcards and truncation in constructing a comprehensive search. This information is also available in written guides - see the links below.