How to research effectively
Joining search terms
When you have found your keywords and concepts you will need to combine them to optimise the different tools that you will be using. To do this you need to use "boolean operators" (AND, OR, NOT), or truncation.
AND.
The original question had three main concepts:
Novel (concept 1) Film Adaptation (concept 2) English Patient (concept 3).
To find records which contain ALL the terms use AND to combine them.
Novel AND film adaptation AND English Patient
OR.
Each of the columns contain related keywords and concepts. To combine these use the term OR. This will find records where EITHER of the terms appear.
Film Adaptation OR Movie OR Screenplay
Each of the tools that you will be using will have different ways of expressing AND or OR, however the theory of using these remains the same. When using a database for the first time read the Help or FAQ.
Truncation
Truncation is a useful method for searching plurals and variant spellings of a word i.e. adaptation adaptations adapt adapting adapted. Instead of using OR to combine these words you can use the word stem and then a wildcard character to represent any or all of the letters following the stem.
The character varies from databases to database but some some of the common ones are $, #, ?.
Example:
If the database you were using used the ? as the wild card character then adapt? would retrieve adaptation, adaptations, adapting, adapted.
