Once you've got your search sentence up together and have thought about which limiters you wish to apply to your search results, the next thing to consider is where you are going to search for the information you want to find. Your instincts may naturally draw you towards internet-based search engines such as Google or Bing but results from these searches will be so vast, with content that is, in the main, unsuitable for academic research and so not really a useful option for EPQ research.
Instead, try and consider tools which only search across quality academic content, or that are related to your area of interest/research. Selecting the most appropriate tool can then be as impactful on the relevance of your results as getting your search strategy right.
The Library at your school or college is always going to be the best place to start. The resources that they provide access to will have been selected by your teachers and experts within the library team so as to ensure they are of the right level and quality for what you need. You will usually find that your library's collections are a mix of printed, physical stock in the library itself and a range of online collections of journal articles and similar academic output. So start with your library's catalogue - search on there and see what there is for you to use. Also look at the list of online tools they provide and work out which will be appropriate for your area of research. Apply your search strategy and see what is returned.
If you're unsure about how to use any of these tools, speak to your library team who will be very happy to offer some support.
It may be likely though that your school/college's resources don't provide everything that you need for your research. The EPQ encourages you to research an area that sits outside of what you've studied within your courses and your library's collections will have been built around support that curriculum. So, you may find that you need to go beyond and discover and access content from wider collections and research. This is where tools like Google Scholar can be useful. Google Scholar is the academic branch of Google, searching across book and journal content from academic sources. It does have its frustrations and limitations - especially when you click through to an article and find that it sits behind a paywall, but it can be a useful starting point in discovering wider research.
The below video introduces Google Scholar and demonstrates some of the features within it that you can utilise to expand your searches:
We have also produced a PDF guide of the information contained within this video which can be accessed via the link below:
In recent years there has been a move towards a lot more research being published as Open Access, meaning that a version of the research will be available to view for free. Some journal title are solely open access, meaning all of their published content is freely available, and some publishers will release a portion of their content as open access (sometimes changing what is available at regular intervals). You'll then also find articles that have been written by university academics that is published in a journal that requires a subscription, but where a pre-print copy has been added to their university's digital repository and made available as open access. A pre-print version means that it won't be formatted like a journal article and there may have been some changes made before publication, but the essence of the research and article remains the same.
If you've found a journal article via a search that you can't access and you want to see whether an open access copy is available, the easiest option is usually to search for the title of that article via an internet search engine such as Google and any open access copies should appear in the results.
If you want to start out searching across open access content, then here are a few examples of places to look:
Additionally you may find that many subscription-based academic collections will have an open access filter that can be applied to only return results which are freely accessible. This is also often the case with university's library catalogues. For example, Solent University's library catalogue is accessible by all and you can filter results to only those where open access is available. See the Solent Support page of this site for further information.