Debate Advice: Research Tips

By: Jaya Nayar

Summer is one of the best times to catch up on prep you couldn’t finish during the school-year because you were too busy with homework or tests. As you start prepping a new generic, researching the policy topic, or doing camp assignments, here are some helpful research tricks (for Google) we’ve learned throughout our time in debate that can both shorten the amount of time you spend looking for articles and help you find better evidence.

1. Quotations — if you put any word or phrase inside of quotations, the only results that’ll appear on google are the ones that contain those exact terms. For example, if you look up “arms sales to Saudi Arabia” (in quotations), the articles that will appear on google will be limited to only those that contain the exact phrase “arms sales to Saudi Arabia.” However, don’t use quotations unless you want no other endings. For example, if you wanted google to return any of the endings for the word weapon (weapon, weapons, weaponry, etc), then don’t add quotations.

2. AROUND(#) — this is a proximity search term which means it finds terms within a certain amount of words of the other term based on the number (#) you enter. So for example, let’s say the “arms sales to Saudi Arabia” search didn’t yield any results. What you may want to then try is (take note of the quotations still!) “arms sales” AROUND(15) ”Saudi Arabia.” That result will find any articles where the terms “arms sales” and “Saudi Arabia” are within 15 words of each other. There needs to be a space after “arms sales” and a space before “Saudi Arabia” in order to get results.

3. Dash/minus sign — this sign (-) is used to exclude words or terms from the search. Let’s say the “arms sales” AROUND(15) ”Saudi Arabia” yielded a bunch of results, but they were all about arms sales to both Saudi Arabia and Qatar, but you don’t want to defend Qatar. In order to find results exclusively about Saudi Arabia you could enter “arms sales” AROUND(15) ”Saudi Arabia” -Qatar. That search would then stop returning any articles that have the word “Qatar” in them.

4. Asterisk - this sign (*) can function as a wild card. If you looked up “arms sales to the * of Saudi Arabia,” google could return “arms sales to the country of Saudi Arabia,” “arms sales to the kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” “arms sales to the prince of Saudi Arabia,” etc. This function is important for when you don’t know exactly what terms scholars would be using to describe the topic you’re researching.

5. OR - using the word “OR” (has to be in all caps) in your searches results in Google returning either of the terms and not only returning articles that contain both words. For example, if you looked up (“arms sales” OR “sales of munition” or “arms transfers”), Google would return articles that contain either 1, 2, or all 3 of those terms. Another example of this is if you search (“arms sales” OR “military aid”) “Saudi Arabia”, you are guaranteed to get articles that have the word “Saudi Arabia” plus the words "arms sales” and/or “military aid.”

Hopefully this helps you become a stronger researcher! As always, feel free to reach out to us with any questions on our facebook page!

We would like to provide a huge thank you to Ms. Achten for the many lectures she has given the Harvard-Westlake debate team at DebateLA on search terms and how to properly use them!