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Library Research Skills

Information Searching

KEY CONCEPTS AND TERMINOLOGY

AND, OR, NOT	Connecting words (Boolean operators) for combining terms in  a search
* ? +	Common symbols for truncating (chopping off) words to search singulars and plurals and variant endings. * and ? are the most commonly used. Example: female* finds both female and females in many, but not all, of our electronic indexes.
RECORD	The description of a document (article, book, etc.) found in a search.
FIELDS	The various parts of a record, such as author, title, abstract, publication year. These are usually searchable separately.
FIELD LABELS	Symbols that are used to indicate various parts of a record. Common symbols include JN for journal, PT for publication type, PY or PD for publication year or publication date. Also known as "tags."
LIMITS	Field labels that can be used in a search to limit results by something such as publication year, publication type, or language. Examples: la=english or english in la
DESCRIPTORS	The subject indexing terms used to describe the contents of a document. Common field labels for descriptors are DE or SU. Used to obtain more precise search results. There is often a built-in thesaurus of descriptors from which you can insert terms into your search strategy.
NESTING .	Enclosing search terms within parentheses with the word OR between words. This allows the searching of several words as a group Examples: (shakespeare or marlowe) and staging (gun or firearms) and control and (law* or legislation)

Keyword Searching

In order to most effectively use the capabilities of an electronic database, it is useful to use a search strategy worksheet to help organize your thoughts. A sample worksheet is attached.
 

Notice that the worksheet has a place for you to write out the search topic. You should be able to

DESCRIBE WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR IN ONE SENTENCE.

If you cannot say what you want in one sentence, you probably need to think about it some more to get a clearer idea of what you are trying to ask.

After you have written your topic sentence, look at it and pick out the two or three main ideas (concepts) that you can give a computer to identify your topic. Ignore small words such as with, the, by, and, to, an, from, for. Each concept should be expressed in just a word or a short phrase (two or three words). List each of these concepts in the proper place on the search worksheet. For example:

Example of a topic sentence

Locate articles on censoring the words in music.

 Concept 1          Concept 2

The two main ideas:            censoring       words in music

Not every word in the search topic becomes a concept for searching. Typically, two or three concepts (sometimes only one) will do to describe the topic without being too specific or too general. The actual number depends on your search.

List below some synonyms or related terms for the sample topic.

Topic: Locate articles on censoring the words in music.

Concept 1	Concept 2
Censoring	Words in music

Often when searching, you will want to include all variations of a word. For example, when looking for information on censor, you will also want to locate citations mentioning censoring or censored. To save yourself the trouble of entering each word separately, you may use the appropriate symbol, such as a question mark (?), as a wildcard character to locate all the variations based on the word 'censor.'

For example:                     

CENSOR?

retrieves CENSORS, CENSORED, CENSORING, CENSORSHIP

This use of the ? is called truncation and should be planned on the worksheet. Look at the list of terms representing each concept and look for the common stem. You need to be careful, though, because truncating on a very short stem could retrieve words you don't want. For example, if you truncated the stem ban (to retrieve banned), you would retrieve records containing words like banana, band, bandages, etc.

Now that you have isolated your concepts and chosen your search terms, you must create relationships between each of these words; you must include in your search some way of telling the computer how the concepts are related. You do this by inserting logical operators between the concept words in your search.

There are three logical operators used in online searching (also called Boolean operators, named after George Boole, the mathematician who originated Boolean algebra). The operators are OR, AND, and NOT.

OR	The OR operator is used for synonymous terms and tells the computer that any of the search terms connected by OR can be used interchangeably, since they all refer to one concept. In the example, either lyric or words in music may be used. The information you want the computer to find can be about lyrics or words in music (or the variations of these words).
AND	The AND operator is used to intersect two or more concepts. When you use the AND operator, you require the computer to locate articles containing a combination of several different ideas. In the example, both censor and music must be used. The information you want must contain the combination of both of these ideas.
NOT	The NOT operator excludes or eliminates a particular term from the search. It is rarely used. In the example, you might want information on any kind of music but not music on videotapes.

As you complete your worksheet, you will determine where the logical operators will be used in your search.

Anything you list in one column represents the same idea so you will use the OR operator to tie together all the terms in that column as one concept. At the same time, each of these separate concepts are combined by using the AND operator.

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