Law Search Guide: Build a search strategy

Understand your assignment task, look at your:

• The assignment question/task/topic
• The objectives of your unit
• The marking criteria/rubric for your assignment

Consider:

• What are your task words/direction words (verbs that indicate what you have to do)?
• What are your topic words/subject words (usually nouns that highlight the issues that you need to discuss)?
• What are you limiting words like time, jurisdiction, and area of law, where is the focus?

What other words can be used in place of your topic words? Explain the topic in your own words. What words do you use? Use the Australian Law Dictionary or Australian Legal Words and Phrases to find out if a word has been defined in the law. 

Use your topic, your task, topic and limiting words and ask questions of your topic:

• Who?
• What?
• When?
• Where?
• Why?
• How?

This will give you a better understanding of your topic.It will also help you to get an idea of how you might want to structure your assignment.

Consider brainstorming with another student or a group of students.

Write your ideas on a piece of paper, map your ideas, use a brainstorming app.

Now that you have developed a good understanding of your topic and have found keywords it is time to search CDU Library through Library Search.

• Use double quotation marks ("...") to search for a search term that consists of multiple words.
  • Example: "youth crime"
• Use truncation to substitute possible endings of words with the symbol *.
  • Example: Australi* - you will find information containing words like Australia, Australian, Australians, etc. 
• Use the Boolean operators AND, OR and NOT to narrow or broaden your search.
  • Example:
  • youth AND crime - you will find information containing both search terms.
  • youth OR child - you will find information containing either or both search terms.
  • crime NOT rehabilitation - you will find information on crime, but not on rehabilitation.

Library Search-  The main Library search box, this search tool will find hard copy books, eBooks, newspapers, and many journals

Databases-  A searchable collection of journals and other material, often databases have a subject speciality, for example, Lexis Advance is used for Law. 

Watch this short video on picking out keywords. Build on using keywords but using Boolean in the next tab of this box. 

Boolean Searching is a logic-based system that is used for online databases. See the document below that will explain how using Boolean can help you use your keywords to the maximum.  

Watch this quick video on using Boolean:

Google Scholar can be a handy tool to use to find additional information such as: scholarly literature, some of which can be found in the library collection and some freely available; conference papers or theses.

Use double quotation marks to search for an "exact phrase".

Example: "climate change adaptation strategies"

This would find results that include the exact phrase "climate change adaptation strategies" instead of individual keywords like climate, change, adaptation, and strategies scattered throughout different parts of the text.

Exclude terms from the search using a minus symbol (-).

Example: "climate change adaptation" -policy

This search will find results that include the exact phrase "climate change adaptation" but exclude any results that mention policy.

Search within an exact time period to limit results to a select time frame.

Example: "climate change adaptation strategies"

After running the search, under the date section click Custom Range and then choose the range to limit to, for example, the past 5 years (2019-2024).

If you have been asked to find academic, credible or peer reviewed information Library Search is a great place to start.

Benefits

• one place to find books, ebooks, journal articles, newspaper articles, theses, streaming video and much more
• results can be filtered many ways - chose peer reviewed articles, full text online, narrow down by date range
• advanced search allows easy combining of several search terms.

If you know the EXACT title of the resource, enclose it in quotation marks, e.g. "The road to social work and human service practice".

Use quotation marks around an EXACT phrase e.g. "mental health".

If you are looking for topics use keywords, e.g., "mental health" AND "social work".

Advanced search is not harder but it is a more visual search.

When you want to combine your search terms using Boolean operators, advanced search can help you plan and organise your search and identify weak points.

To start with Advanced Search, click the button to the right of the general search bar.

When you are searching with advanced search, you need to know how to use your Boolean operators and search techniques.

• Join common terms with OR on the same line.
• Join lines together using AND (to include term/s) or NOT (to remove them).

See this image below for an example of an advanced search in Library search.