As any detectorist can tell you, searching requires strategy and patience.

Effective searching takes precision. This section shows you how to perform several steps to make your searching more precise—you’ll turn up more sources that are useful to you and perhaps, sources that may be even crucial to your research question.

You’ve probably been searching in a more casual way for years and may wonder: Is going to the trouble of precision searching actually worth it?

Yes, definitely, for searches that are important to you! You’re in competition with many people who are working to be as skilled as they can be. So you should use of these steps for course assignments and for information tasks you do on the job. With other tasks and searches, precision searching may be less important.

Here are the steps for an effective search.

1. Identify Main Concepts
2. List Related Terms
3. Form Search Statements
4. Search Iteratively