Information Literacy for First Year Students: Lesson 5: Phrase searching, snowballing and nesting

Phrase Searching means searching for two or more words as an exact phrase. This allows you to find documents containing a particular phrase e.g. “air pollution” or “biofuel energy”.

Try Snowballing: assuming you find at least one relevant journal article you can use that as a basis for future searches, for example:

Look at the list of references at the end of the article to see what related work the author has cited.

• Nesting (or 'GROUPING') is a keyword search technique that keeps alike concepts together, and tells a search engine or database to search those terms placed in parentheses first.
• Using Nesting in your search requires that the items in parentheses be searched first. Generally the items in parentheses are linked by the Boolean Operator "OR."
• Use Nesting when you are trying to link two or more concepts that may have many synonyms, or may be represented by a number of different terms to obtain more comprehensive search results.
• Example: Using (South Africa OR Africa) AND HIV/AIDS will search South Africa or Africa first