Library & Research Skills Tutorials

SEARCHING BASICS

1.  Keywords & Search Terms

Start by thinking of a variety of related words and phrases (synonyms) appropriate to your topic. 

• For example: aging, elderly, elderly people, seniors, senior citizens, elder care, elderly care, geriatrics, geriatric care, geriatric medicine, medical gerontology,etc. Writing down a list can prompt additional ideas.
• Enter each term in your search engine (alone and in combinations) and compare the results.
• Examine the subject terms (also called subject headings or keywords) listed within each article record--these serve as "tags" to categorize content.
• Pay attention to the words in the abstracts of articles you find to be relevant to your project and reuse them to search more precisely.

2.  Boolean Logic - Including, Excluding, or Relating keywords and concepts.

Combine your keywords and phrases using the following logical operators, often called Boolean operators after the mathematician and logician George Boole.

RMIT University, Australia (2002-08-07)

• Upper Left - When you relate terms with AND, the search is Narrow. Results show only if both terms are present. Therefore, the blue intersection is very small.
• Upper Middle - When you link terms with OR, the search is Broad. Results show if either or both terms are present. Therefore, the blue intersection is very large.
• Upper Right - When you link terms with NOT, the search is Narrow. Results show only one term without the other one. Therefore, the blue intersection is small.
• Lower Left - This more complex search, which also uses parentheses to group terms, has a fairly Broad result. We see results with two terms, and with a third term. Therefore, the blue intersection is fairly large.
• Lower Right - This more complex search, which also uses parentheses to group terms, has a very Narrow result. Results show two terms, without a third term. Therefore, the blue intersection is very small.

3.  Phrase Searching

Place quotation marks around a phrase to ensure that the search engine seeks the entire phrase—not the words separately. For example: “alarm fatigue," "blood test," "elder care," and so forth.

When searching secondary schools as unrelated keywords, you will get a very large result because the result contains two very common words that occur in many different contexts. By contrast, "secondary schools" is a very precise concept, and search results will be very precise.

4.  Word Stem, Substitution & Wildcard Searching

Wildcard symbols (also known as substitution or stemming operators) can help expand the scope of a search. In almost all cases, this symbol is an asterisk *.

• Identify the root portion of your keyword and add the symbol. For example: nurs* will search for nurse, nurses, nursing, etc.
• You can substitute within a word for variants: wom*n, labo*r

5.  Consult the Help page (or equivalent) for tips in each database.

Although generally, search engines operate alike, each may have its own unique features (such as the truncation symbol indicated above).