This page provides information on getting started on your assignment and keyword searching strategies.
Check out the training programs offered by the Library introducing e-books, and referencing using the bibliographic software EndNote.
IEEE and Harvard referencing styles are generally the recommended styles by the Electrical and Electronic Engineering lecturers:
VU Library has a number of reference management tools to help you to manage bibliographies and references when writing essays, papers, reports, and articles:
Refer to the Academic Resources & Referencing page to read about the writing process and its steps.
Key words are words in a question that tell you the approach you should take when answering an assignment question.
Keywords can include content (topic), limiting (restricting), and task (instruction) words.
Assignment example:
"Determine and describe the basic components of an electric power system for a small business centre with five 20 storey high rise buildings."
Content Words
Source: University of New South Wales
Limiting Words
Task Words
When you are searching for information for an essay question, assignment or project, use the identified content and limiting keywords to search for information sources in our Library Search and online.
Sample assignment topic: "Determine and describe the basic components of an electric power system for a small business centre with five 20 storey high rise buildings."
Once you have analysed your topic and done some preliminary reading, you are ready to break down the chosen research topic into key concepts selected from both the topic and your readings. It is best to identify 2 to 4 key concepts, with each concept containing up to 2 words, which will serve as keywords or search terms you'll type in Library Search to find relevant resources. You might need to build separate search strategies for different aspects of your research as well as use a variety of keywords to ensure you cover all aspects of the topic.
Source: University of Texas Libraries
If, for example, you want to focus on 'electric power systems' and its 'basic components', list your main concepts or keywords:
electric power systems
basic components
Apply the following strategies to combine them:
Boolean Operators are the words AND, OR, and NOT used in library databases that can make searches more precise, and save you time by removing the need to go through all the search results in order to find most relevant articles.
AND narrows the search resulting in more focused results, for instance, searching for “fuel cell” AND "solar', all articles in your result will include both concepts (keywords)
OR broadens the search by instructing the database to search for any of the words, which is particularly useful for synonyms or related terms, i.e. “fuel cell” OR “solar” OR “lithium”
NOT narrows the search by instructing the database to remove all unnecessary search results, for example “fuel cell” NOT “solar”