Law: Undergraduate Support Services

• Begin with only 2-3 terms. Avoid long phrases. (The more terms you enter, the fewer results you’ll get.)
• Synonyms: If your first term doesn’t work, try a synonym or a broader term.
• Subject terms show how a database organizes records:
• they can help you locate more items on that topic and related topics.

When you start off with your search, use keywords and avoid insignificant words ‘on’, ‘the’, ‘of’; ‘in’ etc.

Example:
Topic:
Investigating the impact of emotional advertising on consumers

You can now start to search by using your keywords which will give you the best retrieval results.

When identifying search terms, pay particular attention to the following aspects to ensure that all likely relevant terms are included in the search strategy:

In electronic bibliographic databases, you can use AND, OR, and NOT in Subject searches, which look for matches in the title, author, subject headings, and note fields of each catalog record. After identifying the most important concepts, it is necessary to indicate how the concepts should be linked with Boolean operators (AND, OR NOT). Various methods are used to combine the indexed terms in order to retrieve the desired result. The best known of these are logical operations, known as Boolean operators. It is also important to keep in mind that most Search Engines require that Boolean operators be typed in Capital letters

• And combines search terms so that each search result contains all of the terms. For example, travel and Europe finds articles that contain both travel and Europe.
• Or combines search terms so that each search result contains at least one of the terms. For example, college or university finds results that contain either college or university.
• Not excludes terms so that each search result does not contain any of the terms that follow it. For example, television not cable finds results that contain television but not cable.

Truncation means to make it shorter. 

After identifying all the possible relevant search terms, decide whether you are going to use truncation (*,?) to extend the search strategy. Truncation may be used to restrict the search to a word stem.

• Example: Searching for politi* will find information on politics, politicians, political, politically. Do not truncate too early in the word, as poli* will also find information on police, polite, policy. Some search engines also use wildcard searching, where you can use organi*ation to search for organization or organisation.

Example: Wom?n

• Information on both woman and women will be retrieved
• Middle truncation is especially useful to provide for spelling variations

• Parentheses are symbols () or "" put around words to show what is inside should be kept together. 
• Example: “conceptual art” will get different results from conceptual art. Using inverted commas to indicate a phrase will get fewer and better results.

Example of parentheses using brackets
 

Phrase Searching means searching for two or more words as an exact phrase. This allows you to find documents containing a particular phrase e.g. “air pollution” or “biofuel energy”.

Snowballing

Try Snowballing: assuming you find at least one relevant journal article you can use that as a basis for future searches, for example:

Look at the list of references at the end of the article to see what related work the author has cited.

Nesting

• Nesting (or 'GROUPING') is a keyword search technique that keeps alike concepts together and tells a search engine or database to search those terms placed in parentheses first.
• Using Nesting in your search requires that the items in parentheses be searched first. Generally, the items in parentheses are linked by the Boolean Operator "OR."
• Use Nesting when you are trying to link two or more concepts that may have many synonyms or may be represented by a number of different terms to obtain more comprehensive search results.
• Example: Using (South Africa OR Africa) AND HIV/AIDS will search South Africa or Africa first

Search engines

A search engine is a website that collects and organises content from all over the Internet.  

Advantages

• The indexes of search engines are usually vast, representing significant portions of the Internet, offering a wide variety and quantity of information resources. The large number and variety of search engines enrich the Internet, making it at least appear to be organised.
• In addition to keywords, search engines let you use advanced search options to refine your results. These options help make your searches more flexible and sophisticated.
• A good source to locate scholarly information

Disadvantages

• Anyone can publish information on the Internet
• No bibliographic control on published  information
• Content and features of sites change very fast
• Creates information overload

Examples

General: Google, Google Scholar, Bing (Microsoft's search engine),

Google tips

Internet searches, such as using the search engine ‘Google’ will give you different types of information than searching a scholarly journal database.

Recognise official links as opposed to commercial websites.
• .edu (It sometimes means it is related to educational or research material)
• .gov (It usually means it is related to government resources ).
• .org (It usually is related to official organisations, eg. United Nations)

Google will also provide ‘related searches’ that might help you to narrow down your research topic. For example, you need information on the postmodern theorist Fredric Jameson.

Scroll down to the bottom of the page and look at what type of information it provides. This might help you to narrow down your search.

• Put quotation marks "__" around words that you want to search as a phrase; i.e. “semiotics analysis"
• To remove a word from your search using the hyphen (minus sign) - just in front of the word; i.e. semiotics theorists
• -Barthes (excludes search term)
• -COM will remove commercial sites from your results.
• To search colleges & university sites, use site: edu as part of your search. You can use the site: with any domain. Must be a lower case (s) in the site. No suffixes. Eg site:newyorktimes.com
• A plus + symbol in front of a word means the word will definitely be in your search; i.e. +“barthes“
• .. Shows all results from within the designated time range, e.g 2008..2013.
Definitions
• Just put define:… in front of the word you want, e.g define: semiotics

• Boolean Operators Search help

• Searching Help