February 02, 2008
With a partner or on your own, describe one search strategy that you are familiar with or that you learned in the session today either to narrow or broaden a search.
In twenty words or more, explain the search strategy to someone who’s unfamiliar with it. First, explain if the strategy is used to find more articles (broaden your search) or find fewer articles (narrow your search).
To develop your explanation, you might describe the concept, provide examples, compare it to something else, explain how it works - or all of these things.
Here are some possible search strategies you could explain:
- Boolean Searching: AND, OR, NOT
- Subject Searching
- Keyword Searching
- Truncation or Wildcards: school*
- Phrase Searching: “school violence”
- Limiting your search: full-text or peer-reviewed articles
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Limiting your search: full-text or peer-reviewed articles. clicking the little box that says full text throws out all articles that do not have full text, and keeps all of the full text articles, same for checking the peer-reviewed article box, it only keeps all of the articles that have been peer reiviewed.
If you use And in searching a subject, it narrows your subject because it searches for topics that contain only those words together.
searching with and will include all articles with the two words. Or works good when you have two words that mean the same thing. Not is works good when you find that when you are searching you find a word comes up that you dont want in your search.
Keyword searching will help broaden your search because it is not just searching for titles but all through the article and/or journal for the word or words that you are looking for
Truncation or wild cards:
for example, tart* would not only research tart, but also letters that could follow. “Tarts”, “tarter”, “tartest”, will also be included within the search.
Limiting your search to full-text can help to narrow your search because it won’t take clippings of articles that include your subject, just full-text articles that you can actually cite and learn more information about with.
Also, limiting your search to peer-reviewed articles will narrow your search because peer-reviewed articles are scholarly and academic, and thus they are a much more credible source.
To limit your search a good strategy to use would be the use of AND. For example:Wartime press AND journalism. This type of search is referred to as an operator, which also includes OR and NOT. In this particular situation AND narrows the search by finding all the words.
To narrow you search you could use “not” or “and.” When you use “and” you will only get articles that have both keywords/subjects. When you use “not” you will not get the articles that have that keyword in the article. To broaden your search you may use “or.” Using “or” will give you articles that will have one or both keywords/subjects.
My search strategy is to use operators. It can narrow your search which can be helpful if you know exactly what articles you are looking for and don’t want to spend forever looking for them. For example if you need to know what people have said about solving the problem of aids in Africa you would search solutions and aids and Africa.
When searching for a topic to cover all possibilities one must use a wildcard at the end of the topic. For example: baseball*
This way topics with baseball, and baseballs come up. The asterisk allows any ending to be placed on the desired topic, therefore; covering all end of your topic.