In the Planning your search section we looked at the importance of identifying keywords and alternative terms. However, your search terms are just the first step to retrieving good results. The second step is how you apply them to Library Search or other databases. An effective search strategy requires the use of search techniques.
The purpose of search techniques is to improve your search by helping you to find more relevant results efficiently and effectively. This works in several ways
Which techniques should you use?
There are some important search techniques that can help you to search much more effectively and the following tabs will look at them in more detail.
When searching databases you can increase the relevance of your results by combining your search terms using Boolean search operators. The main operators are AND and OR:
AND
OR
Databases treat the keywords that you use very literally. For example, if you try to find articles on nutrition therapy by searching for the words nutrition and therapy the database will find all articles that contain one or both of these words. As a result you could end up with irrelevant and out of context results on, for example, cognitive therapy, or animal nutrition.
Instead you should type in your keywords enclosed in speech marks as so, "nutrition therapy". Using phrase searching and enclosing terms in speech marks will find an exact phrase, which can increase the accuracy of your search results.
This is shown in the screen shots below.
1. Without speech marks
2. With speech marks
The number of results has decreased from over 1,370,558 to just over 17,900.
Truncation is another tool that can be useful even in a basic search. Truncate means 'to cut off' and in terms of searching it means we remove the end of a particular word, leaving behind the stem which is shared by multiple terms so that we can look for them all without having to type every word in.
You could use it to look for words that have a singular ending of 'y' and a plural ending of 'ies' e.g. therapy / therapies or you could look for words that start with the same set of letters no matter the range of endings e.g. ocean / oceans / oceanography / oceanographer
The symbol for truncation is an asterisk (SHIFT+8 on your keyboard) and always goes at the end of a sequence of letters.
You can also use the truncation symbol at the same time as using phrase searching, so you could have "occupational therap*" which would find 'occupational therapy' / 'occupational therapies' / 'occupational therapist' / 'occupational therapists'.
Wildcards are used to represent unknown or variant characters within a word. (The truncation symbol from the basic search tools box is also a wildcard)
Not every search tool is universal and can be used across multiple databases although, generally, if two databases are produced by the same company they are likely to use the same symbols.
In Library Search it uses the following to look for variant characters.
Enter a question mark to perform a single character wildcard search. For example, type wom?n to search for records that contain the strings woman, women, and so forth.
NOTE:
*Truncation symbols may vary depending on what database you use so always check the help section of the database you are using.
Proximity searching can be useful if you find that phrase searching is too restrictive. When you do a phrase search you're saying to the database 'you can only show me results where word 'a' is immediately followed by word 'b' and so on. This does not allow for differences in how something may be written. You could have two of your key terms in the same sentence, but not side-by-side, and that article is still relevant but would not be added to your results if you only did a phrase search.
To broaden your reach and find material that's relevant but may be worded differently, you could try using proximity or adjacency searching. Simply put, you're asking the database to look for words that are near to each other.
How you do this will vary from database to database but you will have to decide how far apart the words can get and still be (in your opinion) relevant.
Proximity searching in EBSCO databases
In the EBSCO databases there are two choices the letter N or the letter W followed by the number of your choice.
N tells the database to look for your words near to each other no matter what order they appear in so e.g. early N3 education will find: early years education / education in the early (years) as well as other combinations
W tells the database to look for your words near to each other in the precise order you typed them in, so e.g. osteoporosis W3 falls will look for the word osteoporosis anywhere up to, and including, three words away from falls. But, osteoporosis has to come first.
Proximity searching in the Web of Science
In the Web of Science the proximity search is similar with the difference being that you spell out 'near' instead of using a single letter. So you would type in e.g. maths NEAR/5 school
There are two options for proximity searching in the Elsevier database and you can access these via the advanced search tab on the main page.
PRE/ tells Scopus that you want to look for instances where the first term in your search precedes the second by whatever number you've added. So, for example, nursing PRE/4 patients will look for articles where nursing precedes the word patients by four words or less. So you'd find: nursing cardiac patients / nursing duties for surgical patients etc.
W/ tells Scopus that you want to search for your terms within a certain distance of each other and this search will look for eitehr of your terms appearing first. So, for example, child W/5 trauma will find articles where the words child and trauma were found no more than five terms apart from each other.
What you use in a database will depend on what you're trying to find, and how it may be expressed in the literature when it's being written out in 'academic speak'. Sometimes a phrase search will be your best bet; sometimes you may find that proximity searching lets you find some material that the more restrictive phrase searching cannot find.
You won't use the same search options every time you search - mix and match depending on your needs at that particular time.
Although this video concentrates on the Basic search it does include help and advice on using some of the more advanced search techniques such as truncation and phrase searching.
