Formulating a Search Statement

In this section you will learn how to formulate a search statement or question.

After performing your background research you should be able to formulate a question or search statement. The first step in the process is to write a concise, effective search statement or your professor may have already given you a specific search statement to begin your research. The statement or question should make it clear what you are looking for and also provide keywords /key concepts that you will use in your search.

Keywords or phrases are usually nouns or compound nouns which hold the major meaning
in a sentence.
Most search statements contain two or more concepts.

The general topic that I have chosen is sleep disorders. After doing some background reading about sleep disorders, I learned about narcolepsy and became interested in how it is treated and whom it affects. Next, I combined these thoughts into a question or search statement. This is how I arrived at the following search statement.

Example: What is the treatment of narcolepsy in the elderly?

The keywords in this search statement are: treatment, narcolepsy and elderly

After completing some background reading we learned that narcolepsy is one of many sleep disorders and because we may or may not locate enough information about narcolepsy we are going to use the broader term, sleep disorders, that we discovered by reviewing some background sources to locate additional information to begin to build our list of key words. The psychology topic that we have chosen to learn more about is sleep disorders. An excellent resource to start your search would be Encyclopedia Britannica Online, which is one of our library's databases. Encyclopedia Britannica is an encyclopedia that can be accessed online. To connect to Britannica Online link to the library homepage ( LINK) and click on databases. Next, choose Britannica Online as the database you want to work in by placing a check mark in the box in front of Britannica Online. Type sleep disorders in the search box, click on Go and then click on Pathological aspects of sleep disorders. Numerous keywords can be obtained from scanning this article such as sleep paralysis, cataplexy, REM, and hypersomnias. These keywords are very important, we will be using them later to formulate our search statement or question. Search statements are formulated by combining various keywords to develop numerous different search statements.

Example of key words taken from Encyclopedia Britannica Online

After referring to the indexes in several background sources on sleep disorders I developed the following array of key- words. Two of the many background sources that I consulted were:

Bruno, R. (l986) Dictionary of key words in psychology. London: Boston and Henley R l50.3 B836D

Corsini, R. (ed.) (1994) Encyclopedia of Psychology (2nd ed., Vols. 1-4). New York: J. Wiley & Sons. R 150.3 En19E2

The following is a list of keywords that can be used to formulate search statements.

Keywords obtained from several background sources.

treatment	elderly	therapy	nighttime awakenings	sleep talking
sleep apnea	sleep walking	narcolepsy	somnambulism	night terrors
parasomnias	sleep paralysis	bruxism	grinding teeth	REM
rapid eye movement	dyssomnias	nightmares	sleeping patterns	NREM
daytime nap	aged	stress	senior citizens

Examples of search statements: What is the therapy for grinding teeth during sleep?

                                                 Is sleep apnea more prevalent in the elderly?

                                                 Does rapid eye movement (REM) occur during sleep walking?

What is phrase searching?

Phrase searching is the combining of two words side by side that are generally referred to in this manner.
Examples of phrase searching would be:

sleep paralysis or night terrors.

"Now that you have completed, Formulating a Search Statement, let's move onto the next section. To proceed, click on the Identifying Keywords/Key Phrases/Key Concepts link below.