Search Strategies
When you are beginning your search process, there are some helpful tips that will aide in locating sources. These are especially helpful when you are using a database and you need to locate a specific article or topic.
Do you notice the endless amount of information available at your fingertips? This can be difficult to navigate and can lead to frustration when the results only seem to bring up unrelated results. Have no fear! Not only do you have a librarian available to support you through this process, you also have a special set of rules you can use to support your search! These "rules" fall under a Boolean Search. The most common operators of a Boolean Search are AND, OR, NOT. In the future we will be adding to this knowledge by discussing operator precedence, but for this research project, we want you to focus on these three operators.
AND
This operator is the most widely used in the search process. It is used to narrow the results and focus solely on sources that contain the keywords.
For example, if you search "jousting AND knights" your results will be sources that contain both jousting and knights.
OR
Use this operator when you are looking to broaden your search results. When you use OR between the keywords, the results to your search will be sources that contain any of the keywords. This can be helpful if you have a word with a synonym and you're not sure what word would provide the best results.
For example, if you search "cat OR feline" the database will provide results that include either of these terms.
NOT
Use this operator when you want to make sure a particular word or topic is not included in your results.
For example, when searching for "knights" you might find a lot of results about the hockey team. If you do not want to include the hockey team in your search results, you could search "Knights NOT hockey."
Phrase Searching
Still struggling to locate information about your topic? No worries! There are other search strategies to try!
Phrase searching is helpful when you want the results to include the exact phrase you are looking for. To do a phrase search, you want to add quotation marks around the exact phrase.
For example, if I want to look for articles on White Nose Syndrome, I might have more success with a phrase search. If I was to simply put White Nose Syndrome into the search, the search may consider it White AND Nose AND Syndrome. This could lead me to a lengthy result page and I would have to sift through all the sources to locate one that specifically talks about White Nose Syndrome in bats. By placing quotations around "White Nose Syndrome," I now am going to have results that have these three keywords together in a phrase.