Electronic Sources: Search Tips
From Nulisbus
Contents |
Types of Advanced Search
- Free text
- searches the whole record
- Field search
- title/abstract/author
- Thesaurus/Index
- controlled vocabulary
- Boolean
- and = both terms
- or = either 1st or 2nd term
- not = find 1st but not 2nd term
- Truncation
- econ*
- Wildcard
- may be a $ ? or some other symbol
- e.g. organi?ation
- Proximity
- marketing w/3 France
The above are various ways of searching electronic databases. Not all databases employ all of the techniques above, however you will find that a combination of several of the above will work on most databases. These advanced search techniques can save you a lot of time, as they should help you narrow your search to exactly what you are looking for thus avoiding having to trawl through irrelevant search results.
Free Text Search
Your keyword is searched for throughout the entire text held by the database. This is probably the most common form of search and an example of this is Google. Advantageous if your keyword is unique, however common words used as keywords will result in a lot of “hits” being returned. This means that although you may have found relevant information, you will have to sift through lots of results to find them.
Field Search
A bit like the Free Text Search except you are prompted to select a field for your keyword to search e.g. Title/Author. Whichever field you select is the field that your keyword will search in.
Thesaurus/Index
Type in a keyword and other keywords will be prompted for you to select.
Boolean
Probably the most common form of advanced search. Works in most search engines and databases. Boolean terms, such as and, or, not, are placed between keywords. This helps to narrow your search and should produce “hits” with higher relevance.
Truncation
e.g. econ* This will look for economics, economist, economy, economical etc as keywords
Wildcard
as the example above shows, if you place a ? in organi?ation replacing the s or z, then your search will look for both organization & organisation as keywords. A good tip if searching a database that includes both US & UK English publications.
Proximity
E.g.marketing w/3 France means that when you are searching you are looking for the word marketing to be within 3 words of France. If you just put in marketing and France as keywords it is possible that an article could be returned where the first word in the article is France, and the last is marketing. By using the w/3 option then you get a higher degree of relevance from your “hits”
As mentioned above, not all databases support the different search techniques. To find out which techniques are employed by a specific database or search engine, click on the “Advanced Search” link and you will be shown the various options.
