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Breaking down your research question
Typing a sentence into a searchengine ordatabase will not searchresources effectively.
Youneed to think and planan effective searchstrategy.
Make sure youunderstand the topic.
Identifythe main concepts in your research questionbefore you start searching.
Three concepts are good starting points for your search.
Let’s have a look at the followingexample:
How to integrate sustainability in business models and create
sustainable business?
What our research is going to be about? What can we see from the question?
We are interestedin sustainability and business models.
We are lookingto explore different components of a sustainable business model.
We are going to findout about difficultiesand challenges in pursuing sustainability
by organisations.
Selectkeywords − make a list of them. What search terms can you identify?What alternative terms
and/or phrases might you needto include,basedon your existingknowledge of the topic?
Avoidbeingtoo general (‘resources’) ortoo specific(‘Howto integrate sustainabilityinbusiness
modelsand create sustainable business?’) withyoursearch terms.
Considersingularsand plurals,differentwordendings,keyacronyms, spellingdifferences,
hyphenated and non-hyphenatedwords.
Start searching.
You may discovermore key words.Use them.
Alwaysbe prepare to reviewyour search strategy. It will helpyouto findwhat you need.
Remember that searchingtakes time.