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.
Start by breaking your question down into individual ideas and terms. We call these keywords.
Example topic: Discuss the impact of criminal justice diversion programmes on youth reoffending rates
From here, select what you think are the keywords or concepts. You can usually ignore verbs such as 'discuss', 'analyse' for your search.
- Criminal justice diversion programmes
- Youth
- Reoffending rates
Once you have your keywords, take a moment to decide if there are other words that mean the same thing (synonyms). Not all authors use the same words to describe the same ideas.
If you're stuck, try Googling the term and seeing what comes up. You can look for words that mean the same thing, more specific terms or broader terms.
- Criminal justice diversion programmes: diversion from prosecution, early intervention, pre-court diversion
- Youth: adolescent, young person
- Reoffending: recidivism, rearrest
- Acronyms and abbreviations - B2B, business to business
- British and American spellings - behaviour, behavior
- Terms you can write as one or two words - reoffend, re-offend
For this topic, you may be interested in the following information types:
This is not a comprehensive list. Our Information sources page has more detail on this.
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:
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.