Search Strategies:
Tips for Working with Databases
Creating A Search | Boolean Operators
Truncation | Wildcards | Proximity Searches | Grouping | Limiters
Creating A Search
There are many strategies that you may employ when looking for information in a database. When starting your search, it is important to plan out your search strategy in advance, and follow these 4 important steps to insure that you receive the results that you are looking for.
1. Define your topic (write a few sentences that explain what you are looking for)
2. Choose keywords (select keywords from your sentences)
3. Group like keywords together
4. Decide how groups of keywords are related.
Use single keywords instead of phrases when beginning your search. Because single keywords are searched more broadly than phrases, this will give you a greater chance of success when beginning your searches.
1. Begin with your topic.
Research the problem of child poverty and homelessness in the United States. Based on your readings, answer this question: In what ways do homelessness and poverty affect children´s perceptions of themselves and their ability to do well in school?
2. Keywords: (Pull out the main keywords of your topic)
| child | poverty | homeless | United States |
3. Regroup: (Regroup like words together, including synonyms, plurals, and spelling variations)
| Child | Poverty | Homeless | United States |
| Children | Poor | Homelessness | US |
| Teen | Destitute | USA | |
| Adolescent | Low Income | America |
Note that plural forms of keywords have to be considered, variant forms of keywords, British spellings etc. Although most databases favor American spellings, other resources may be found by including by using the British variations.
4. Combine: (Combine these word groupings into a search phrase using Boolean and other operators)
| Child | And | Poverty | And | Homeless | And | United States |
| OR | OR | OR | OR | |||
| Children | Poor | Homelessness | US | |||
| OR | OR | OR | ||||
| Teen | Destitute | USA | ||||
| OR | OR | OR | ||||
| Adolescent | Low Income | America |
You should search like keywords first, and keep these together in a group. For the above example you will obtain four individual sets of like keywords.
Some databases allow terms describing the same concept to be input as one statement joining terms by OR e.g. Child OR Children OR Teen OR Adolescent. Other systems may limit input to one keyword at a time; the resultant sets of records are then combined using OR.
Two or more different concepts (i.e., dissimilar groups of keywords) should then be combined with AND e.g., Child etc AND Poverty etc. In this example, Poverty etc modifies the set Child etc.
e.g. Child etc AND Poverty etc
Hints
- Decide which groups of like keywords are essential - start with these
- Be aware of the need to include singular/plural forms, alternative words, British spelling.
- Build the search up in small, logical steps.
- Short Phrase searching can also be a very effective tool, but should be used with caution. (the phrase that seems logical to you may not be the best or most appropriate one)
- Experiment with short phrase searching after trying single key word.
Boolean Operators
- AND — narrows or decreases the amount of results in a search. All terms entered with AND must be present in the record in order for it to appear. Use AND to focus your search.
- OR — broadens or increases the amount of results in a search. Any term entered with OR must appear in a record for it to appear in the results list. Use OR to group synonyms together.
- NOT — narrows or decreases the amount of results in a search by excluding the word or phrase following NOT from the result list. (Sometimes used as AND NOT) Use caution when using NOT, as it often discards the useful as well as the useless.
Truncation
Retrieves variations in word endings. For example, if you enter teach* (* is the symbol that stands for truncation in many search engines, but each engine is different), you will get results for not only teach, but teacher, teaching, etc. Use this to expand your searches for all forms of a word that can be used in similar situations to describe a topic.
Wildcards
Allow you to substitute one or more characters within a word to pull different words into your search. For example, ‘?’ is a wildcard symbol in some search engines. If we were to use a ‘?’ in the word women, it would look like this wom?n. By doing a search with wom?n, we will retrieve results that contain either woman or women.
Proximity searching
Can be used to search for two or more words that occ 6/27/06 each other within a document. There are two operators that are used in proximity searches are N and W.
- N (Near Operator) – searches near another word. Use this to look for words that fall near each other, but do not have to be in a certain order. For example, tax N5 reform would find results that would match tax reform as well as reform of income tax.
- W (Within Operator) – searches within a certain range of words. Use this to look for words that are located within a certain range of each other and in order. For example, tax W8 reform would find results matching tax reform but not reform of income tax.
Grouping
Allows you to group phrases and terms together to create a more focused search.
- Quotation Marks “ ” – allow you to search for a phrase. By combining words together with quotation marks, you tell the search engine to only bring back results that contain that phrase. e.g. “sports injuries” will retrieve a different set of results than sports and injuries.
sports and injuries = 2465 results
“sports injuries” = 1275 results
- Parentheses ( ) – let you control a search query, and modify your searches by modifying their placement. If you do not use parentheses, terms with AND and NOT have priority over terms with OR. If you use parentheses, elements that are enclosed in parentheses are executed first. In the example below, the same search terms are used, but the use of parentheses modifies the search, and produces the following results:
Lung or ((kidney and liver) and skin) = 5912 results
(Lung or kidney) and (liver and skin) = 9 results
Limiters
Limiters let you narrow the focus of your search so that the information retrieved from the databases you search is limited according to the values you select. You can use more than one limiter if more than one is available.
Common limiters that can appear below the Search Options tab include:
- Full-text – Click to limit results to articles with full text.
- Peer Reviewed – Limits search results to articles from peer-reviewed or refereed journals.
- Journal/Magazine – Enter a journal/magazine name in this field to limit results to articles only from that title.
- Date Published – Use this option to search for articles within a specified date range.
This page is based on a document created by the Curtin University of Technology Library. Available from http://lisweb.curtin.edu.au/resources/cdsearch.html