SPAN 3381 Hispanic Current Events: Planning Your Search

Plan your search:

• Describe your search as a question or sentence.
• Pinpoint major concepts included in the search question or sentence.
• Use synonyms, alternative ideas to relate to major concepts. Use dictionary if needed.
• Mix and match these keywords to conduct your search.

• Get background information on your topic. Use reference handbooks and encyclopedias.  This preliminary research will help you identify more keywords. It will also help you better understand scholarly articles with specialized vocabulary.

·         Nesting ():

Most databases and major search engines support complex Boolean searches. If you have a complex search using more than one operator, you can nest your search terms, using parentheses. Search terms and operators included in parentheses will be searched first, then terms and operators outside the parentheses. A search for:

(ADD OR attention deficit disorder) AND college students

will search for documents containing either the acronym ADD or the words attention deficit disorder, then narrow the search results only to those documents that also contain the words college students.

·         Truncation (* in databases, ? in library catalogue)

Or word stemming can be used to search for a portion of a word with a variant ending. If you searched for therap* you would return results that included therapy, therapist, therapeutic, therapists and any other word that started with the letters before the truncation symbol.

Be careful not to truncate too far, or you will retrieve unrelated words!

·         Quotation marks “ “

Will search the exact phrase, e.g.: "date fruit"

From St. Petersburg College Library, 2011

Before you do any of the database searching, learn about Boolean Logic:

The examples above illustrate general topics expressed with just two keywords. Actual search strings, which express complex topic ideas, may consist of several keywords and combinations of Boolean operators.

The thesis statement "Automobile air bags are not safe for children" might result in the search string:

automobiles AND air bags AND children AND safety

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From St. Petersburg College Library, 2011