Use when there may be several forms of a word that are appropriate for the concept e.g. reduc* searches for reduce, reduction, reduces, reducing.Use a truncation symbol – check the database help screen to determine the truncation symbol to use e.g. *, #, $, ?
Phrase and Proximity Searching
Proximity Operator: Phrase Searching "mechanics of materials" (Check database help screen for treatment of stop words (such as "of").
Proximity Operator: NEAR e.g. mechanics near materials.
Boolean Searching
AND - Use “AND” between two concepts to retrieve articles that contain both concepts e.g. mechanics AND materials.
OR - Use “OR” between two words to retrieve articles that may contain one or the other words. Use OR if there are alternative words, (usually with similar meanings) to use to express a concept, e.g. computer AND (modeling OR simulation).
NOT – Use “NOT” to eliminate articles that contain a specified concept or word.
Field Searching
Fields are designated parts of the bibliographic record for an article, e.g. title, author, abstract, journal title, subject, main heading, controlled term, descriptor and you can limit a search to only retrieve articles that have the search term in a specified field of the record for the article.
Basic Tips
1. Search a variety of types of information – researchers’ Web sites, technical reports, dissertations, conference proceedings, journal articles and books, etc.
2. Use a variety of periodical indexes as appropriate for the topic and aspect of your research.
3. Formulate keywords for searching.
4. Formulate a search statement using keywords, phrases, Boolean Logic, truncation and field searching.
5. Examine the set of results and modify your search statement and keywords and phrases to obtain more/better results – FOR EACH INDEX.
6. If your search results in too many or too few and not relevant results, use techniques to:
- Narrow (find fewer) a search or
- Broaden (find more) a search OR
- Make your search more precise.
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