Stop Staring at a Blank Search Bar
Get the search terms, synonyms, and ready-to-use Boolean strings you need to start your literature search with confidence — built from your actual research question.
One of the most frustrating moments in early research is knowing roughly what you’re looking for, but not knowing how to actually find it. You type something into Google Scholar and get thousands of irrelevant results, or almost nothing at all. You’re not sure if you’re using the right terminology, or whether your field uses different language to another field studying the same thing.
This tool solves that specific problem. Give it your research question and the database(s) you have access to, and it generates a structured set of search terms — including the alternate phrasings, synonyms, and broader or narrower terms used across your field — plus ready-to-use Boolean search strings formatted correctly for Google Scholar, EBSCO, and/or Scopus.
It won’t do the reading for you. But it will make sure you’re searching the right things, the right way, from the start.
What you’ll get:
- 4–6 core concepts pulled from your specific research question
- Alternate terms and synonyms used across different subfields
- Broader and narrower terms to expand or narrow your search as needed
- Ready-to-use Boolean search strings, correctly formatted for the database(s) you select
I’ve spent years helping postgraduate students across disciplines get unstuck at exactly this stage — and a poorly constructed search strategy is one of the most common reasons a literature review takes far longer than it should.
Note: One-time use, $7 USD. Be as specific as possible in your research question — naming your population, context, and variables of interest will produce much stronger, more targeted results than a broad topic description. Fill in the form below to access the tool.
Need the actual literature, not just the search strategy?
Once you’ve run these searches, there’s still work ahead — screening results, reading papers, making sense of what’s relevant and how it connects to your argument. That’s as it should be; that critical engagement with the literature is part of your research, and it can’t be skipped.
But if you’re short on time, or you’d simply rather start with a curated, pre-screened set of literature rather than wading through database results yourself, that’s exactly what my Literature Starter Pack is for. You’ll receive a set of peer-reviewed articles that have already been found and screened for relevance to your topic — each with full citation details, an abstract, and a note on how it’s relevant to your study and how you might use it.
To learn more, book a free 15-minute introductory call below.