[MUSIC] In this module so far, we have discussed what kinds of information to look for and where to look for it. Now we'll look at how to search for sources of information effectively. Because of the large amounts of information you are expected to read, critically evaluate, and refer to in your university work, you will want to make your information searches as quick and as effective as possible. But while you might already be good at searching for certain kinds of information, shopping online for a pair of shoes, for example, searching for academic information sources can be a lot more complicated. This is because of the large amounts of information sources in any field. The sheer number of different sources available and the depth of the information they contain. In this lesson, we'll focus on defining your information need, developing a search strategy, and then documenting and evaluating your search strategy. Before searching for information sources, it's useful to define the information need before developing a strategy. While it might seem easier to start by searching for anything on a topic you can find, in the long term it saves time to spend a few minutes planning out your search strategy in advance. The first in defining an information need is to analyze your assignment prompt or question and break it down into a set of subtopics. Each of these subtopics will become a category of information that you'll look for. Let's try this with our sample essay question. The question starts with the overall topic, implications of artificial intelligence doing traditionally human tasks. Then it gives three different perspectives from which to discuss these implications, technical, social, and economic. That signals to us that we should discuss the implications from each of these angles after starting with the overall topic of artificial intelligence doing traditionally human tasks. Then we have one heading for each of the types of implications that we need to discuss, technical implications, social implications, and economic implications. While subtopics two to four are quite specific, the first heading is a bit general. Here is where we can interpret the question by thinking about what kind of information we should provide in addressing the subtopic. We should probably say what we mean by the key terms artificial intelligence and traditionally human tasks. This involves defining the key terms. We could also provide examples to the reader of this. By doing this, we have broken down the longer complex assignment prompt into a list of simpler subtopics that we can use to plan our search strategy. The next step is to consider what information you already know or have about these subtopics. For each heading, make notes about your answers to the following questions. What do you know the topic? What examples can you think of? Include any information that you learned through your course lectures, tutorials or readings. For example, you might already have a definition of artificial intelligence from a course that includes this topic. If not, try to write some ideas about what you think it is. After you make notes for a subtopic, look over your course materials and see if you already have a source that discusses this area. Note down this as well. When reviewing your notes, you'll hopefully find that you already have some arguments and ideas around these subtopics, and these will be important in shaping your assignment. Next, look for any gaps in your notes or for any additional evidence you may need. As we've already seen, certain subjects use primary, secondary, or even tertiary sources, and the question might also include this. Also, some assignment questions might specify which texts you should refer to. In our case, because the question is about current development in artificial intelligence, we will need the most current information available. This information may come from journal articles, recent books, websites and more. What kind of information you need will inform where you look for it. In our case though, as we want cutting edge material, much of our information searching will take place on various databases online accessed through the university library. Once we've collated the kinds of information sources we need and identified where we need to look, we almost have a search strategy. Next, we need to develop a set of search terms we can use. These search terms will grow and change as we conduct our search, as we become more familiar with the subject literature, and as we see which terms work and which terms don't. To begin with, however, we can develop an initial set of search terms by finding synonyms for key words in the subject headings we identified. You can see here some of the key terms we've identified in the example question. Notice here, too, that we can sometimes just use different forms of the same word. So, for example, a synonym of social is society. If you entered those search terms individually into a search engine you would come up with a lot of results and very few of these would be relevant. The final step before searching is to prepare a list of combinations of search terms. Check that these will help you find information that is relevant to the subtopics that you've identified. While you're searching it's a good idea to document where you've looked. For example, which databases and search engines and which search terms you've tried. By keeping track of this, you can revise your search strategy as needed and prevent repetition of searches. [MUSIC]
