You've probably been to the library and seen its four floors of books, archives, and journals. No doubt you've been on the library homepage on the Web and seen its long listing of Databases for Research. There's a ton of stuff available to you—an overwhelming amount, much more than you can read in your lifetime. A Search Strategy is a plan for where to look to find the best material for your project. At earlier stages of your education, you may have used only the strategy of doing a Google or Yahoo search, and if you did, you know you can get lots of material in a hurry from that kind of search. But now as you begin more specialized research in a specific discipline, you need a more sophisticated search strategy, one that will give you a better chance of finding the most reliable, most authoritative, and most scholarly material to work with.

To design a search strategy, you need to recognize that there are different sorts of resources, found in different places, using different search engines. A search strategy organizes your quest for materials around a number of steps designed to increase your chances of finding the best available material in several categories—reference works, books, articles, websites, and other research materials.

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