Search Techniques Improving your search strategy
Undertaking research is a lot more than typing a few words into a database or search engine, and looking at the results. Sometimes you get thousands and thousands of hits, sometimes the results don’t match what you want, and on other occasions you can’t find anything at all. It’s too easy to spend hours going round and round in circles, getting frustrated, not finding the article you need.
What can you do to find what you need, and quickly?
Firstly, you must definine your topic. Think of individual keywords/terms that express the nature of your topic.
For example, if you are doing research on “the environmental impact of air transport on nearby communities”, your keywords might be: environmental, air transport, and communities.
The words you have chosen may not appear in an article that may be relevant to your research. Therefore it is important to consider similar words that can be used in your search, possibly in different combinations – these are known as Synonyms.
For example: Instead of Try
environmental ecological
air transport airports
community local area
Broader and Narrower Terms
If you find too many hits you may need to use more specific terminology (narrower terms) to define the subject you are searching. In contrast, if you find too few articles you may need to use more general words (broader terms).
For example: narrower terms for air transport could be aeroplane, Boeing, or aircraft, and a broader term for air transport could be transport.
Truncation and Wildcards
You can use “truncation” or a “wildcard” character to include different forms of the same word in your search. Truncation symbols vary, but some common symbols used are
* or # or ?.
For example: artist* would search for artists, artistry, and artistic.
The wildcard symbol serves as a substitute for one character or none, like the blank tiles in a game of Scrabble.
For example: m?cdonald retrieves both mcdonald and macdonald.
Thesaurus
Many databases have standardised words or terms that they use to describe things.
For example: textile (instead of cloth or fabric)
There is often a thesaurus or index available for online databases. By checking it, you can ensure that your search is as accurate as possible. In addition to listing keywords, it may also show related or similar words that you can use.
Also remember, if a database is produced in the USA, you may need to try using American words or spellings.
Search Methods
Keyword Searching
Keyword searching is the most common method for searching. A Keyword Search searches for the word or words you have typed in. You can use a Keyword search on the different fields that are available in a database, such as Title, Author, or Abstract, if you want to search to be more specific.
Boolean Operators
Nearly all databases and search engines use this method of searching. Boolean operators can be used to link different keywords together. The Boolean Operators are:
AND searching for “domestic and violence” will make a search more specific by only showing references that contain both words.
OR Searching for “domestic or violence” will retrieve records with either the word domestic or the word violence or both words.
NOT searching for “violence not domestic” will result in references containing the word violence but not the word domestic.
Depending upon what you’re searching, symbols can be used instead, so AND becomes +, and NOT becomes –
Natural Language Searching
This is a broad search method. It will search all of the words you enter (excluding certain ‘stop words’ such as a, the, it, to, etc.) in any order, and usually in the entire text of an article or the whole of a web page.
For example: “statistics on child poverty in large American cities”
The disadvantage to natural language searching is that it is often not specific enough. It may give results that are irrelevant, or because the vocabulary is not controlled, it may actually miss out relevant results. Many databases do not have a natural language search facility.
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