Information Skills: Search techniques

The principles of combining keywords are the same wherever you search but some search tools will use different symbols or methods.

What you need to do is consider which keywords need to be included in the search, which are alternatives and which can be excluded. To do this, you can connect your keywords together with something called a search operator. These are special commands and characters that filter search results. They do this by making your searches more precise and focused.

This section will help you use the most common search operators, which are AND, OR and NOT. You will also learn further steps you can use if you have too many, or too few results.

When you use operators carefully you have extraordinary control over your search results.

An example search is shown to produce results for variations for the Olympic games. The search will give you results with at least one of the words sustainability or sustainable or eco-friendly, plus the words olympic games.  

For more information on why and when to use AND, and OR see the explanation below.

AND

Focus your search by joining keywords with the word AND.

When you use AND between terms, you specify that both terms must be found. Searching Olympics AND sustainability AND Rio will only find resources that mention all three keywords.

Using AND narrows your search. You will find fewer items but they will be more specific because they contain all of the keywords.

OR

Broaden your search by joining keywords with the word OR.

When you use OR between terms, you specify that either term can be found. Searching Olympics OR sustainability OR Rio will  find resources that mention any of the three keywords. OR is usually used to combine words that are similar or mean the same, for example sustainability OR recycling. In this way you can search lots of alternative words in one go.

Using OR widens your search. You will find more items as the resources could contain any of the keywords.

NOT

An additional way to limit your search is by using NOT. This will exclude the word.

When you use NOT before a word it specifies that you do not want items that contain this word. This can be great if you are getting lots of irrelevant results due to one word. However, use NOT with care as it may potentially exclude resources you would like to see. Searching Olympics NOT sustainability would find items on the Olympics but exclude any that mention sustainability.

Knowing different search tips can really improve your results and filter out those items you don't want to see. Using library databases you can use lots of advanced search functions to improve your search and further extend your search capabilities.

Too many results?

Try these search features:

• Filter your search to specific resource type, subject, date range or full text using the database filters.
• Field searching means restricting your search to a particular part of a record (field) such as "title", "author" and "abstract" rather than looking for keywords in whole documents. This narrows your results.
• Thesaurus searching returns very relevant results as the items have been pre-labelled as specifically about the topic rather than just mentioning the keyword somewhere. Most databases will highlight subject headings and allow you to click on them to go directly to more items on the same topic.
• Phrase searching will look for a string of words next to each other exactly as typed in (in the same order). For example, "Green Olympics" will only find items where those words appear together, rather than where "green" and "Olympics" appear in separate places.

This video, which is two minutes long explains how to execute these techniques in a library database called Ebsco, though the techniques can be applied to any library database.

Too few results?

If you have too few results try these search functions:

• Truncation allows you to search for all variations of a word with a common stem. For example, recycl* will find recycle, recycling and recycled.
• Wildcards allow you to replace one letter of a word where there are different spellings. This can be useful when you have variations in American and UK spellings. For example, organi?ation will find both organisation and organization.

Always remember to review and modify your keywords to make sure they are still appropriate to your search.

Following the first video, this video is two minutes long explains how to execute these techniques in an Ebsco library database, though the techniques can be applied to any library database.