You may have made it to this point in your studies by coming across articles to support your assessment tasks in various serendipitous ways, rather than by being very systematic in your literature searching. But now you are going ot have to find not just any articles and references, but the best and most relevant ones. And you're going to have to record how and where you found them!

Before you get going, you need to come up with a search strategy - which may evolve and change as you go on with your searching. This involves:

• Breaking your research question down into discrete searchable concepts
• Coming up with synonyms (words and phrases) for each concept
• Deciding how to combine your terms (using Boolean operators)
• Deciding on the limits of your search (language, date of publication, study type etc)
• Deciding which databases are the best ones to use for your topic

You might also find our Database Help Guide useful. 

You can request books from the different CSU libraries to be sent to you or ask for a chapter of a book to be digitised: Requesting items and digitisations. You can also request articles through Interlibrary Loans.