Allied health

Planning your search

Try not to search your entire question at once. This won't find many useful results. The techniques below can help you plan your search.

Finding keywords

Start by breaking your question down into individual ideas and terms - we call these keywords.

Example topic: Discuss the impacts of smoke-free legislation on smoking prevalence

Highlight what you think are the keywords or concepts.

• Smoke-free legislation
• Smoking prevalence

Now list words that mean the same thing (synonyms). If you're stuck, try Googling the term and seeing what comes up. You can look for synonyms, more specific terms or broader terms.

• Smoke-free legislation: smoking ban, smoke-free policy, tobacco control policy
• Smoking prevalence: smoking uptake, cigarette smoking, quit ratio

In addition, here are some other things to think about:

• Abbreviations and acronyms - HRQOL, health-related quality of life
• British and American spellings - paediatric, pediatric

Information sources

For this topic, you might be interested in the following types of information:

• Government or WHO reports
• Journal articles for the latest studies on smoke-free legislation and smoking prevalence
• Official statistics

This is not a comprehensive list. Our section on Information sources has more details on source types.

Use limits and filters

There are millions of books, articles and websites available, and you won't have time to look through all of them. To help with this, you can decide on limits to your search. This can include:

• Publication date - depending on your topic, you may only want the most recent information available. 
• Language - you can limit your search to specific languages.
• Geography - you may only want research from or about a certain place.
• Sector - you can look at specific sectors such as the public sector or private sector, or industries such as healthcare or retail.

Choosing your own topic?

If you have chosen your own topic, it's important to start with some general searches to make sure there is information out there before you finalise it. If the topic is very specific or new, you may struggle to find enough information. If your topic is too broad, you will find too much information.

I need help with research question frameworks?

If you are trying to define a research question for a dissertation or research project using a framework is a useful approach.

Research question frameworks can be used to help frame a question and plan for empirical research or structured literature review. They are widely used in the field of health to investigate practice-based questions but they are also useful in other fields of research. 

Our guide will help to address questions such as what is a research question framework and how can they help to focus my research question. You can also view different types of frameworks with examples.