Searching for Information (Research for Academic Study)
This video considers how to conduct academic information searches more efficiently by identifying keywords, using boolean operators, and using other advanced search techniques, for searches conducted with library catalogues, online databases, and online search engines.
Searching for information
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00:00 Intro
01:00 Identifying key words
02:16 Boolean operators
04:59 Advanced searches
09:40 Summary
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You can identify keywords by: (1) brainstorming; (2) finding important words in the thesis statement (if you have written it); (3) finding important words in research questions (if you have any); (4) identifying keywords or names in the working reference section (if you have compiled one).
Boolean operators are used to in searching library catalogues, online databases and search engines to limit or expand results. The boolean operator AND can limit searches by requiring both (or all) terms to be included. In practice, most databases and search engines will ignore this operator, since searches are AND by default. The boolean operator NOT can be also used to limit searches by excluding one or more terms. An alternative to this is the minus sign -, which should be attached to the word which is to be ignored. The boolean operator OR is used to expand searches by returning results which contain either or both of the terms in the search.
There are various other advanced search techniques you can use in addition to boolean operators, especially if using web searches.
Quotation marks " " can be used to limit the search by requiring results to contain the exact phrase searched for.
The operator site: can be used in online search engines to limit results to a particular site or particular domain. This can be useful if you want to use only academic domains (.edu or .ac.uk), or government domains (.gov), which tend to provide more reliable information.
The operator filetype: can be used in online search engines to limit results by specifying a particular filetype in search results, for example PDF or DOC.
The operator intitle: can be used in online search engines to limit results by specifying a word or phrase which must appear in the title. If using a phrase, it should be enclosed in quotation marks.
Many databases and search engines allow the use of wildcards, in other words symbols which can replace characters or words. The most common wildcard symbol is the asterisk * symbol. In databases such as EBSCO, the wildcard is used for truncation, e.g. allerg* would return searches containing allergy, allergies, allergen, and allergic. In online search engines such as Google or Bing, the wildcard is used to replace one or more words in an exact search using quotation marks.