Library Tutorials: Search Strategies

Before you do any searching, brainstorm a list of all the words and phrases that might relate to your topic. You should ask yourself, "What words might other people use to talk about this?"

When you make your list, think of synonyms (words that mean the same thing) and broader and narrower terms for your topic.

For example, if your topic is:
What are the advantages and disadvantages of electric cars?

Search terms for electric cars could be: electric cars, automobiles, vehicles, hybrids, Chevy Volt, etc.

Search terms for advantages/disadvantages could be: fuel efficiency, cost, performance, technology, gasoline prices, etc.

You should also consider the many different forms of a word: auto, autos, automobile, automobiles, auto makers, automobile industry, etc.

Boolean operators are words such as AND, OR, and NOT that you use to combine search terms. The operator you use will either broaden or narrow the results of your search.

Most (but not all) databases will assume that you want to use the operator "and". This means if you type "whales dolphins pollution legislation law", the database will assume you mean "whales AND dolphins AND pollution AND legislation AND law". Unless all of these words are present in an article, the search will not retrieve any articles. In a case like this, the more terms that are entered the less results will be found.

Credit: Lexy Spry & Emily Wixson, Chemistry Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2008.

Here are some general tips and strategies you can use whenever you search a library database.

• Don't type an entire sentence into the search box. Think of the most important two or three words that deal with your topic. The more words you use, the fewer hits you will get, and vice-versa.

• Be flexible with your search terms. Think of synonyms, related words, and broader and narrower terms. Think of all the words other people might use to talk about your topic.

• Be careful with spelling. Computers do exactly what you tell them to do, so if you spell a word wrong, it doesn't know it. It's looking for exactly what you typed.

• Pay attention to which search field you are searching. Where is the database looking for your search terms? In a subject heading? In the title of the article? In the full-text of the article? These will all bring up different results.

• Most databases use a controlled vocabulary with official subject headings. This means that they've organized all the articles into topics with subdivisions, narrower, broader, and related terms. You can use these subject headings to get ideas and guide your search. This will enable you to get articles that are about your topic, rather than the ones that just mention it.

• On the other hand, sometimes it's necessary to use a keyword search (or "all text") to find your search terms anywhere in the article. Keyword searches should be used in these cases:
  • When the thing you're searching for is so rare (or new) that there are no official subject headings for it (yet.)
  • When you're looking for a very specific phrase. For example, there might be tons of articles that list garlic as a subject, but you're only looking for things that mention aged garlic extract. This might be too specific to have its own subject heading.
  • When the index you're searching doesn't have a controlled vocabulary.  Some types of articles (such as newspapers) simply don't have a controlled vocabulary. In these cases, keyword searching is your only option.
  • When you can't figure out what phrases are being used by the database to refer to your topic. In this case, you could use pearl growing (see below.)

• One technique that librarians and researchers use is called pearl growing. This is when you use the subject headings listed for an article to get more ideas. For example, let's say you're looking for articles on low-carb diets. You did a keyword search on carbohydrates and brought up 5,000 articles that mention them. The first few articles aren't really about your topic, but the fourth title is exactly what you're looking for. You look at the official subject headings for that article and one of them is High Protein Diet-- Evalution. You never would have thought of the phrase "high protein diet evaluation" on your own, but now you know the language that this database is speaking. You can use this knowledge to find similar articles. Conduct a subject search for High Protein Diet -- Evaluation and get a complete list of all the articles in the database that deal with that topic.

• There are many ways to expand or limit your search. (Expanding means you'll get more articles, and limiting means you'll get fewer articles.) Often, databases will let you limit your search to scholarly journals, to full-text articles, or to certain dates.
  

Web search engines (like Google) are not organized by people, but instead have robots (called crawlers) that scour the web collecting pages. Although some search engines index billions of individual web pages, no one search engine covers the entire web. For example, most of the articles you find in our library online databases will not be found on any search engine.

Web search engines allow searching by keyword. They look for your search terms anywhere on the page. They usually use some sort of complicated formula to determine which pages they list first. Some search engines are better at this than others, which is why you might get a few web pages that have nothing to do with your topic when you do a search.

Search Engine Tips

• Keywords matter. Like with the catalog or online databases, try out different combinations of keywords. Try to think of the different words that people might use to talk about (or write about) your topic. Don't give up if the first few combinations of words don't work.
   
• Boolean searches. Most search engines use Boolean AND as the default. That means that a search for mauve avocados will be interpreted as mauve AND avocados, and will only find pages where both of the words appear.  This also means that the more search terms you use, the fewer results you will get.
   
• Use quotation marks. If you're looking for a specific phrase, put it in quotes. For example, if you're looking for information on a person, a search for Marty Butts will find any page that has the word Marty and the word Butts anywhere on the page. However, typing "Marty Butts" in quotes will only get you pages that list the two words together in that order.
   
• Use "wedge words." These are words that limit your search to the type of information you want. For example, words like statistics, review, FAQ, images, graphs, and maps will limit your results to pages that contain those words. Sometimes this can be helpful.
   
• Advanced searching. Google has an option for advanced searching, which will allow you to combine terms and search for more specific things. Here you can limit your search to a certain language, date range, domain name, images, video, and more.

Lake Land's Web Links

Lake Land's library website has a list of websites that may be helpful for finding information. You can access this by clicking on the Research Guide called Recommended Websites. 

A keyword search is simply looking for instances of your search terms anywhere in the article or book record. It's like casting the widest net when you're fishing. 

You will get a lot of stuff with a keyword search, but you'll also get a lot of things that aren't very relevant.

For example, a keyword search on "adoption" in our catalog will bring up a long list of items, including a book about the history of the federal reserve.  Why?  Because in the book's summary, a sentence mentions "the adoption of a more active monetary policy."   

For a more focused search, think of searching the Subject field.   

Consider the following book titles:

Global Warming
Our Simmering Planet
Climate of Fear
The Coming Global Superstorm
The Greenhouse Effect

You might not be able to tell from just reading the titles, but all five of these books are about global warming in some way. A librarian has gone through each of these books and assigned to it the official subject heading global warming. So when you do a Subject search for books on that topic, each of these titles will come up, even though the phrase global warming only appears in one of the titles.