More Search Hints!
The above video shows you how to use AND to connect keywords when searching, but you can also try the Boolean terms OR and NOT.
NOT
How does it work? Well, imagine you are searching for information on the transference of HIV from mother to newborn. When you run searches, you continually are finding results based on African case studies, but your interest lies in cases outside of Africa. By adding NOT to your search you can exclude these results. Not is very limiting. It will exclude EVERY reference to Africa, even if the majority of the content in the article is about your subject.
Example: HIV AND Pregnancy AND Transmission NOT Africa
OR
How does it work? OR broadens your search by telling the database to look for articles that contain either of the terms you have listed. For example, if you were looking at how unhealthy habits impact a woman's pregnancy, you would probably find an article about smoking useful, but you could also look at an article about drug use during pregnancy. These two articles would not necessarily talk about both smoking AND drug use, so AND wouldn't work well in your search. OR operates better.
Example: Pregnancy AND Smoking OR drug use
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Final tip - if you use quotation marks around phrases, the database will look for the two words together in the text. For example, if I search for "drug use," the database will look for articles that have the words together as opposed to "drug" being in the first paragraph and "use" appearing in the third.
Example: Pregnancy AND smoking OR "drug use"
Eli Pariser: Beware Online "filter bubbles" from TED Talks is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND
What does relevance mean in an era of tailored search results?
While many of us have come to expect relevant search results as part of any web or app search, evaluating the relevance of search results for a college paper requires critical evaluation skills.
Popular Searches
While a restaurant app like Yelp can give you a list of local places to eat, keep in mind that your zip code is a mediating factor in this search. Your zip code limits the results thus building relevance into the search results.
Likewise, you may see ads in Facebook or Amazon.com that seem related to your latest status update or product search. In this case the mediating factor is your FB status or a DVD you recently browsed. But, imagine if you changed one of those mediating factors. If you searched for “Sandburg” using Google in a Milwaukee zip code, the first hit will be “Carl Sandburg Hall”. If you were to do this search in Chicago, the first several results will be about Carl Sandburg’s poetry.
Scholarly Searches
In academic research, popularity and location are not necessarily effective or useful ways to mediate a search. This is why we focus on selecting a set of search terms that will lead to the best results. In academic research, you will choose your vocabulary carefully to build mediating factors into your search, evaluate the results for relevance to your topic and then edit your search with new or different vocabularies as you continue searching.
Information Literacy Tutorial by Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at guides.library.uwm.edu
