Information Literacy Modules: 5 Searching as Strategic Exploration part 1

Searching is Strategic

Used with permission from UW Libraries / Kali Stoeher & Anna Eisen Research 101: Searching as Strategic Exploration
Searching is Strategic Transcript available at bottom of box

Selecting Search Tools

When you start your research you need to begin somewhere. When exploring a broad topic, doing some research for background information can give you some clues so you can narrow your topic and begin focusing your research.

To be most effective in your searching, you need to think about what you need so you can "pick the right bucket" to search in. Why search an ocean for a fish you know lives in the smaller pond? 

Think about what types of sources you are looking for. This will help you determine which search tool to use.

Which Search Tool to Use

Questions to Ask Yourself

To help you choose the right search tool, ask yourself some questions about your information needs.

What types of materials are needed?

• Books
• Magazine articles
• Newspaper articles
• Scholarly journal articles
• Websites
• Other materials (statistics, government documents, images, etc.)

What is the date of the needed materials?

• Current or contemporary materials (written at or about the time the event occurred)
• Retrospective materials (written after an event occurs and "looks back")
• Do your sources need to be within the last 5 years (often a requirement in medical research)

What is your research time frame?

• Borrowing books from another PHSC campus library takes about 2 business days.
• Borrowing books from other Florida college or university libraries takes about 7-10 business days.

What subjects/disciplines cover your topic?

• Humanities includes all of the arts
• Sciences include the "hard" sciences, such as chemistry and medicine
• Social Sciences include the "soft" sciences, such as political science
• Does the topic cover one or more subjects?

To efficiently search for information using these tools, you need to consider the sources you will need. If you know you are researching a medical topic, you would want to start with databases that covered that field. If you are looking for news articles, you would want to use a database that had newspaper articles such as America's News or New York Times Historical. If you aren't sure which database to start with, you can try one of the general ones such as Academic Search Complete which will cover many fields of study.

If you know you want to look for books and ebooks, you will want to search the library catalog / Books & More. Knowing what research tool to use will save you a lot of time.

Research Tip

When you log into the Electronic Library Resources databases, you get a list of databases alphabetically. This is helpful if you know the name of the database you want to use, but not very helpful otherwise.

Try the second drop-down menu titled "Subjects" and look for your particular subject interest. This will group the databases into subject categories to make it easier to select an appropriate one for your topic.

Each database listed provides a useful,  descriptive blurb highlighting what it contains. 

Examples

Scenario 1:

You want to research "treatment options for bipolar disorder" for a paper.

Tools:

Library Databases - you can use some of the databases for the fields of Health & Medicine to find journal articles. CINAHL Complete is a subject-specific database covering Nursing and Allied Health journals. APA PsycArticles is a subject-specific database covering peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journals in psychology. Both of these databases will allow you to select recent research by limiting to more recently published articles.

Library Catalog / Books & More or Everything   - You can search the library catalog for books and more on bipolar disorder and find a variety of books and ebooks such as: Advances in Treatment of Bipolar Disorders [ebook], Behavioral Disorders [book], Investigating Depression and Bipolar Disorder: Real Facts for Real Lives [book],  Living with Bipolar Disorder: A Guide for Individuals and Families [book].

Scenario 2:

You want to research "education in Colonial America" for a paper

Tools:

Library Databases - you can use some of the databases in the field of Education to find journal articles. JSTOR is a general database which covers back issues of core journals in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. ERIC and Education Source are subject-specific databases which will cover the field of Education. All of these will allow you to find scholarly journal articles. For background information, you could use the database American History and find an article discussing the history of public education in the United States.

Library Catalog/ Books & More or Everything - you can search the library catalog for books and more on education in Colonial America and find a variety of books, ebooks, and even a streaming video such as: Formative Ideas in American Education: From the Colonial Period to the Present [book], The History of American Academic Education [streaming video], Government and the American Economy: A New History [ebook], A History of Colonial Education, 1607-1776 [book].

Choosing Keywords

Now that you have selected the search tools that will be most effective for your topic, you need to compose a search (or two or three or even more). To effectively search a database or search engine, you need to find key terms for your topic.

Keywords

Keywords are the words that describe your topic of research. These can be individual words or a phrase. These keywords can be chosen from the sentence you create to define your research topic. Once you choose the significant words, you can then come up with synonyms, or words with similar meanings. Look at your research statement or question and pick out the most significant words (generally nouns and occasionally verbs).

The examples below use the most significant words in the research topic statement along with the name/s of key people or organizations appropriate to the topic. These organizations and names can often be found during the background research process if not already known.

Research Topic

The use of animal furs in clothing is unethical.

Search Terms

• animal rights
• fur industry
• PETA (an organization, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, often associated with the animal rights movement).

Research Topic

Euthanasia should be legalized.

Search Terms

• euthanasia
• mercy killing
• Jack Kevorkian (a name often associated with euthanasia)

Research Topic

Zero tolerance is an effective method for controlling violence in schools.

Search Terms

• zero tolerance
• violence
• elementary schools
• high schools
• NEA (National Education Association, a national organization that represents many teachers and provides a forum for discussion on topics related to education).

Keywords, Boolean Operators

Once you have selected which search tool or database you are going to use and selected some keywords appropriate to your research question, it is time to start searching!

Keyword Searches

Keywords are the words that describe your topic. These can be individual words or a phrase. Keywords can be chosen from the sentence you create to define your research topic. Once you choose the significant words, you can then come up with synonyms, or words with similar meanings. All of these can be keywords to use in forming your search. Generally, when you submit a keyword search to a database, the title, subject, and abstract fields are the only parts of the record searched. Keyword searching is available in almost all databases.

Example

You've chosen the topic "alternative fuels" for a research paper. To help you focus this rather broad topic, you put it into the form of a question or sentence:

What are the types of alternative fuels being used or developed for automobiles?

Usually, the nouns and adjectives in your sentence or question will give you a good idea of what your keywords will be. In this case, the phrase "alternative fuels" and "automobiles" are the significant keywords.

From these keywords make a list of synonyms to use as alternatives. Since different writers will describe the same thing using different words, it's good to arm yourself with a variety of keywords so you don't miss important information.

You probably would need to do some background reading before coming up with some of the terms you see above.

Boolean Searches

This is an algebraic concept, but don't let that scare you away. Boolean connectors are all about sets. There are three little words that are used as Boolean connectors:

• and
• or
• not

Chart showing Boolean search terms and how they work

Operator	Example Search	The search will find...	Ven Diagram- results are shaded
AND	football AND Florida	items containing both "football" and "Florida". AND narrows a search resulting in fewer "hits".
OR	alligator OR crocodile	items containing either "alligator" or "crocodile" or both. OR broadens a search, resulting in more hits.
NOT	exercise NOT yoga	items containing "exercise" but not "yoga". Caution! It's easy to exclude relevant items.

Think of each keyword as having a "set" of results that are connected with it. These sets can be combined to produce a different "set" of results. You can also exclude certain "sets" from your results by using a Boolean connector.

AND

AND is a connector that requires both words to be present in each record in the results. Use AND to narrow your search.

Example

Television — 999 hits
Violence — 876 hits
Television AND violence — 123 hits
The words 'television' and 'violence' will both be present in each record.

OR

OR is a connector that allows either word to be present in each record in the results. Use OR to expand your search.

Example

Adolescents — 97 hits
Teenagers — 75 hits
Adolescents OR teenagers — 172 hits
Either 'adolescents' or 'teenagers' (or both) will be present in each record.

NOT

NOT is a connector that requires the first word be present in each record in the results, but only if the record does not contain the second word.

Example

High school — 423 hits
Elementary — 652 hits
High school NOT Elementary — 275 hits
Each record contains the words 'high school', but not the word 'elementary'.

This video, Advanced Research Tools: Boolean Operators, from the Films on Demand database will explain Boolean Operators further.

Phrase Searching

Most search engines support the use of quotation marks around words, terms, or names you want to be searched as a phrase, i.e., appearing in exactly the order you enter them. For example, "ozone layer depletion" searches for this exact phrase with the words in the order given.

When devising a phrase search, be sure to evaluate the likelihood of your phrase being used by others. For instance, if you were doing a search on the benefits of reading to children, "reading children" would not return results as well as "reading to children." Phrase searching is the one time you may use minor words like of, in, to, etc.

Wildcards/Truncation

Wildcards or truncation symbols provide another way to broaden a search. Wildcards are symbols such as ? or # are used within the body of a word to search alternate spellings. For example, col?r would search for both color and colour.

Truncation symbols such as * are used at the end of a word to search for variations in word endings, for example, color* would search color, colors, coloring etc.

Putting It Together

If you are researching the concept of time management, you would want to do a phrase search. If you search the database Academic Search Complete for time management, you will get over 6,000 results including titles such as "Career Management in Uncertain Times: Challenges and Opportunities" and "Real-time Nodes Permit Adaptive Management of Endangered Species of Fishes". 

However, if you use phrase searching and search for "time management", you will get about 3,600 results that will have the phrase time management.

Subject Terms 

You can be even more efficient by taking advantage of subject terms or subject headings. When you search keywords, you can use any word and the database will look for that word anywhere (in the title, abstract, document text, etc.). This means that while your words might be in the article, the article might not be as relevant as you would like.

To narrow your search more, you can look for the most relevant terms in the subject heading or as subject terms. Most databases use controlled vocabulary to assign very specific words to identify the main ideas or topics of an article. All articles about that topic will have the same subject headings assigned. 

When you search Academic Search Complete for red tide, you will notice in the results that it lists "subjects" for each result. One of the subjects is RED tide.

To see all the articles in the database that have RED tide as a subject, click on the title of the article. The next page will list the subjects for the article as hypertext links -- just click RED tide and you will get the results for all the articles with that subject!

The original search using keywords red tide gave about 357 results. When we click the link for the subject heading RED tide, we get around 150 results. These will be more relevant to our topic. We can further narrow our results by opting to limit to just Scholarly (peer-reviewed) journals. This will give us around 123 results.

If we wanted to focus on red tide in Florida, we could be even more efficient and add Florida as a keyword using boolean searching.

Using advanced search you can search the phrase "RED tide" as a subject heading and use AND to add Florida as a keyword. We have limited our results to "full text" and "Scholarly (peer-reviewed) Journals" and now have 27 results that are much more relevant to our interest in red tide in Florida.

As you start your research and look at some of the early search results, think strategically about what you are trying to research and how you can efficiently narrow your results to the most relevant articles.