Having issues with finding articles on your selected topic?
Can't find any articles on your selected topic?
Most likely your topic or searching terms are too narrow
Sometimes, keywords or research questions are too specific. For example, if I was looking for articles using the research question "Does TAL1 have a role in t-lineage acute lymphoblastic leukemia?", my search would not yield many results due to the specificity of the question. If a research question is too specific, there's little likelihood that there has been a substantial amount of research performed on the topic. The best way to fix this problem is to expand your research question. For example, I could change the term "acute lymphoblastic leukemia" to just "leukemia". This would broaden my search to include articles about all the different variations of leukemia. I could also remove "t-lineage" from the research question/keyword search string (as it specifies a specific type of cell) to include every type of cell that may be involved in leukemia. I could also expand the term "TAL1" to "bHLH". TAL1 is a member of the bHLH family of genes. By expanding the "TAL1" to "bHLH", I can expand my search to include articles that look at genes from the entire family.
Try using different combinations of expanded or specific terms in your search sting to meet your specific research needs.
Consider synonyms
English is a very robust language. There are multiple words and phrases to describe the same concept. This phenomenon is reflected in the personal word preferences of authors. Consider identifying synonyms and like words for the different concepts of your research question. This can help capture articles that have these variances in word use. For example, if my research question was "Do videogames affect the mental health of teenagers?", I can expand my search results by including synonyms for teenagers such as "adolescents", "young adults", and "high school students". I can also include related works such as "minors", "juveniles", and "youth".
A great way to discover synonyms for subject specific words such as "bipolar disorder" is to consult topic thesauruses. They can usually be found in subject databases. For example, PsychINFO has a great thesaurus for psychology terms. Google is also a good option for discovering synonyms. Reading background information can also lead to discovering different word uses for a given topic.
There may be very little to no research performed on the topic
Sometimes, there just isn't any or very little research performed on a topic. For example, if I was searching for COVID-19 research in March of 2020, I would not find any journal articles on the topic because the virus was practically unknown up until that point. Researchers didn't have the time to perform the research. The writer of this guide once had an assignment where she wanted to write about the characteristics of Powassan virus (a rare disease carried by deer ticks). Powassan virus is an extremely rare disease, and at the time there had been next to no research performed on the topic outside of infection rate statistics. She was not able to find any journal articles that addressed the infection pathway of Powassan virus. She decided to change her topic and research question to look at the characteristics of the Flaviviridae virus family (which Powassan is a member). There were many journal articles looking at the characteristics of the Flaviviridae family of viruses. She settled on writing an argumentative paper about how Powassan virus most likely mimicked the same characteristics as other viruses within the Flaviviridae family.
If this is the case scenario, it is best to pivot or completely change your research question to one where there has been substantial research performed on the topic.
You are searching in the wrong place
QuickSearch on our homepage doesn't search every database. Major databases such as ComDisDome (Speech Pathology), Nursing & Allied Health Premium (Nursing), Trip (Nursing), ABI/INFORM Collection (Business), and Sociology Database (Sociology) are not available through QuickSearch. Check out our Databases by Subject page to discover the proper databases for your subject. Start with the "Best Bets" databases, because they are the most robust. Make sure to search more than one database, because different database maintain different journal subscriptions. You can find different articles in different databases. Many of the journals available within these databases are not available through Google Scholar.
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Are there too many articles that don't specifically address your research question?
Narrow your topic
Popular topics such as HIV, cancer, AI, and Shakespeare have an abundance of published articles and literature on the topic. It can be difficult to find an article that addresses your specific research question from the mass of information on the topic. It can be overwhelming and discouraging. The best way to address this issue is to narrow down your research question. For example, "Does the use of chemotherapy cause a higher survival rate in cancer?" is a research question that is so broad that it will encompass every type of cancer that is treated with chemotherapy. Narrowing down your research question to look at a subtopic will help shrink the vast amounts of literature. "Cancer" can be specified to a type of cancer, such as "lung cancer". If necessary, "lung cancer" can be further defined as "small cell lung cancer" or "non-small cell lung cancer". Chemotherapy can be further defined to "neoadjuvant chemotherapy" or "adjuvant chemotherapy". That can also be further defined to a specific chemotherapy drug that is associated with a type of cancer. Making your research question more specific can help databases retrieve more targeted results.
Using the "NOT" Boolean Operator
Boolean operators are words that are included in a search string to define the relationship between keywords. The Boolean operators are: AND, OR, NOT. You can read more about Boolean Operators HERE. NOT is not a commonly used Boolean Operator. But, searching with NOT can be useful for eliminating the unintentional meanings of keywords. For example, the word "bat" can refer to an animal or baseball. If I was searching for information about bats (the animal), I can eliminate articles about baseball by using the NOT operator. An example search would look like: "Bat NOT baseball'. This technique can be useful for eliminating articles that aren't on your topic.
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