Doing Research...search
Plan your Search | Search for Books | Search for Articles | Search the Internet | Search Tips
Plan Your Search
Who would be interested in your topic?Your topic may be of interest to many different people.
For instance, the topic "abortion" may be of interest to:
theologians (religious and moral issues)Each person may be interested in the topic, but each will come at it from a different point of view. This will affect where they publish and what keywords they use to describe their work. Each person will present their opinions, findings, or reports. Because they have different audiences, they will publish in different places. Where might they publish or present their thoughts and how do you find out what has been written?
medical personnel (the process, medical ethics)
scientists (DNA research)
psychiatrists (psychological issues such as counselling)
feminists (women's issues)
historians (historical and social perspectives)
government personnel (any of the above issues)
In books or government documents:
Use the library catalogue to find out what books and government documents are in the library.
In magazines, journals, or newspapers (collectively called periodicals):
Use an article index to find out what articles have been published.On the Internet:
Use an Internet search engine to search for information on the Internet.Planning Tips
Keep a record of which catalogues, indexes and search tools you have used and the search strategy you used so that you can remember what you have done. You may want to go back and refine your searches - don't waste time by doing the same thing twice. Print, or write down, enough information about the book, article, or Internet site so that you can find it again! You will also need this information for your bibliography.
Search for Books
Use the library catalogue to find out what books and government documents are in the library on your topic. The library catalogue provides descriptions of the books, videos, documents, maps and reports that are in our collection.Search for Articles
Use a periodical index to find out what articles have been published on your topic. A periodical index will give you the citations (author, article title, journal information) for articles. Some indexes will give, or link to, the full text of the article. Periodical indexes are usually subject specific - so be sure you are not using a biology index to find articles about Romeo and Juliet.Most periodical indexes are available in form of electronic databases. Choose an appropriate index from the Library's Article Index page.
Search the Internet
Use an Internet search engine to search for free information on the Internet.Learn how search engines work. Search engines are designed to perform in certain ways. To get the best search results, you have to conform to how they do things.
Do your search on more than one search engine - they all search different parts of the Internet.Search Tips
Learning basic search rules will help you get better results when you search a library catalogue, periodical index, or the Internet. Check the Help/Tips screens to find out if the search engine uses:Controlled (thesaurus) terms or uncontrolled (keyword or natural language) terms.Is there a controlled list of subject headings (sometimes called descriptors) or can you only search using the natural language keywords?Boolean (included/excluded words, +/-) logic.Can you combine terms using AND, OR, NOT?AND or + requires all terms to appear in a record (children AND poverty retrieves records that contain the word children as well as the word poverty)
OR retrieves records with either term (e.g. poverty OR poor retrieves records that contain either the word poverty or the word poor)
NOT or - excludes terms (e.g. children NOT adolescents retrieves all the records that include the word children as long as the word adolescents is not also present)Can you use parentheses ( ) to carry out operations in a logical order? For example: children AND (poverty OR poor)?
Truncation/WildcardsCan you enter the first part of a keyword, add a symbol (such as *, $, ?, #) and get any variant spellings or word endings? For example: child* retrieves child, child's, children, etc.Does the search engine use automatic truncation?
Phrase searchingCan you search for more than one keyword, searched exactly as typed (all terms required to be in documents, in the order typed)?Does the search engine use ADJ (or any other term) to form a phrase?
Does enclosing keywords in quotations (" ") form a phrase?
Field searchingCan you limit a search by requiring a word or phrase to appear in a specific field of the documents? e.g, title or subjectWith some databases, you can search by fields such as descriptor (de), language (la), or author (au).
With some Internet search engines, you can search by title, url, or image.
Case sensitivity(capitalization)Does it matter whether you use capitals or not?Most search engines (databases and Web) are not case sensitive or respond only to initial capitals, as in proper names.All lower case (no capitals) will retrieve upper case as well as lower case.
Results rankingHow are the results of the search shown to me?Searches from library databases are usually shown with the newest items first.Each Internet search engine has its own way of presenting the search results, usually based on computerized relevancy guesses.
June 19, 2009
