Finding information well comes down to two choices: picking the right tool (a scholarly database, a search engine, a research guide) and building a focused search with strong keywords. The skill isn’t searching harder — it’s searching smarter.

Most of us have exactly one move when we need information: open a search engine and type. It’s a fine move — it’s just rarely the only one worth knowing, and often not the best.

Think of finding information like shopping for food. Sometimes you want the big supermarket (everything in one place, variable quality); sometimes the specialist shop (less choice, but you trust what’s on the shelf). Knowing which to walk into is half the skill.

The right place, not just the first place

• A library catalogue tells you what books are held and where.
• A database or a discovery search (like FRELIP’s) is where the journal articles live — the specialist shop for scholarship.
• The open web is fast and vast, and quality ranges from excellent to outright invented.

If you’re after a trustworthy academic claim, the open web alone is a gamble. If you just need the local bus timetable, a journal database would be absurd. Match the tool to the need.

A few tricks that make searching feel like a superpower

Once you’re in the right place, a handful of small techniques do a lot of work:

• Quotation marks keep words together: “information literacy” won’t scatter into pages about literacy or information.
• AND / OR / NOT let you narrow, widen, or exclude.
• A star (educat*) catches educate, education, educator in one go.

You’ll usually end up with more than you can read. That’s fine — the next skill is deciding what’s actually worth your trust. On to Evaluating Sources.

© FRELIP, released under CC BY 4.0. Curated by the FRELIP Open Courseware editorial team.