LibGuides: Design Factory New Zealand: Searching tips

Advanced database searching

Keyword Searching

Keywords are the words you type into search engines when you are looking for relevant sources.

Your keywords will be the main concepts from your research question.

This section will teach you how to identify your main concepts and turn them into a collection of keywords that give your search strategy flexibility and scope.

Database video tutorials - Learning Videos - LibGuides at Wintec

Pro searching tips

Most search engines will give you some options to optimise your search and really target the results you want. In this section you will learn about Boolean operators and phrase searching.

Boolean operators (and, or, not)

You may notice the following drop down options when you use the Catalogue or the OneSearch Advanced Search:

**Basic and Advanced Search Features**
Operator/Feature	What it does	EBSCOhost Databases (Academic Search Complete)
phrase parsing	Keeps words together in the order specified.	“South America”
truncation	Used to replace any single character, either inside or at the end of a word. Use multiple wildcards to replace a specific # of letters.	= any number of characters America = america, American; butterfl* = butterfly, butterflies
wildcard	Looks for documents that contain all of your words or phrases. Use AND to narrow your search and get fewer results. Word order does not matter.	? = replaces one character wom?n = women, woman
Boolean operator: and	Looks for documents that contain all of your words or phrases. Use AND to narrow your search and get fewer results. Word order does not matter.	rainforest* and ecosystem*
Boolean operator: or	Looks for documents that contain any of your words or phrases. Use OR to broaden your search and get more results. Always use parenthesis around “or” phrases.	rainforest* and (South America* or Amazon* or Brazil*)
proximity indicator: Near	Look for documents that contain search terms in any order, within a specified number of words apart. Replace the second ‘n’ with any number.	Nn - example: N3 rainforest* N5 ecosystem* rainforest* N10 ecosystem*
proximity indicator: Pre	Look for documents that contain search terms within a specified number of words in the same order. Replace ‘n’ with a number. In the example, 5 means within 5 words.	Wn example: W5 rainforest* W5 ecosystem*
field searching	Use the drop-down option by the search boxes to limit searching to a specific field. Title is the most useful field for focusing a search.
noteworthy features		On the initial search screen, explore the “Search Options” section below the search boxes. “Apply equivalent subjects” and “Apply related words” are good for broadening a search.
essential filters	Limit by date, source type, peer-reviewed, full text, document type, language and more.	Explore the filters on the left side bar of the search results page

Phrase Searching

All you need to do is put quotation marks around your search terms, like this:

Limited and Filters

They are often tick boxes or drop down menus in the advanced search:

Nesting

Nesting is a technique that groups search words. Nesting is useful to organise your search concepts into the order you want the database to process them, such as combining synonyms for each search concept.

Most database use brackets or parentheses for nesting ( )

Pro searching tips

Pro searching tips

Most search engines will give you some options to optimise your search and really target the results you want. In this section you will learn about Boolean operators and phrase searching.

Quick links

Boolean operators (and, or, not)

Phrase searching

Boolean operators (and, or, not)

You may notice the following drop down options when you use the Catalogue or the OneSearch Advanced Search:

The AND, OR, and NOT help narrow and broaden your search.

AND

The AND can be used to join your main concepts. By joining two or more ideas together, your search becomes more specific and your results will therefore be more targeted. You will have fewer results.

The OR can be used to join your synonyms to give your search engine more options (remember, not all sources will use the same words for the same concepts). You will have more results because it broadens your search.

NOT

The NOT can be used to strip out any results that are not relevant. For example, if you are doing research on early childhood education, one of your keywords might be "children". However, your search engine might include results for teenagers. By writing "teenagers" next to the NOT Boolean operator, you will remove all those irrelevant results. You will have fewer results because it limits your search.

What does a search strategy look like using Boolean operators?

Let's use one of the examples from the previous section in which we found the keywords and synonyms for the question Explore the effectiveness of Lego as an adult teaching tool.

By using AND and OR you are joining your main concepts together to limit search results by making them specific, and you are also giving your search engine options to find relevant sources that may use different terms for the same thing.

Lincoln Memorial University

Lincoln Memorial University explains how Boolean operators (and, or, not) work using pirates and ninjas. It's worth a watch for the entertainment value alone.

Phrase searching

Phrase searching is an easy way to limit the number of your search results.

By using it, you are telling your search engine you want to search for words that are side-by-side or in a particular order. It's really important to use it for any concepts that are multi-worded, like "The Internet of Things" or "Postpartum depression".

If you don't use phrase searching for multi-worded terms, your search engine will look for each word separately and you will get a large number of results (many of which will be irrelevant for your research).

All you need to do is put quotation marks around your search terms, like this:

Truncation - use an asterisk (*) after a stem term to expand your search e.g. behav* should search for behaviour, behavior, behaviors, behavioral etc.

Phrase searching - put quotation marks around a group of words that you would like to search as one term. It helps to narrow your search, e.g. instead of music therapy (which will search for music and therapy as separate terms) try "music therapy".

Brackets - it can be useful to group your search terms into brackets, particularly when using engines with only one search bar e.g. (child* OR preschooler or infant) AND (preoperative or surgery) AND (music OR "music therapy) AND (anxiety OR distress)

Why is it useful to search both free text and controlled vocabulary?

Controlled vocabulary (also known as subject headings or thesaurus) refers to the terms that have been attached to a document in a database. Indexers read the documents and select the best terms from a predetermined list of words that best describes the topics of an article. So for example if you are searching PubMed, which uses the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), if an article has been written about heart attacks, it will always have the term myocardial infarction attached to it.

Using controlled vocabulary can ensure that you are using the best term that will find all articles associated with your topic.

However, it is still useful to also search free text keywords (such as "heart attack") as:

Different databases used different controlled vocabulary.
- When searching systematically it is useful to demonstrate these differences and helps you to adjust your
New articles may not have been indexed yet, so if you were to only use the MeSH terms, you may miss new research.
There may not be a subject heading for the concept you are researching.
Some newer words (e.g. augmented reality) may have only been added to the thesaurus recently and won't search articles on the topic that were indexed prior to this.

Keyword Searching

Research Rabbit

Great online tool for finding journal articles. Links to your Zotero Library.