Welcome to the Database Search Tips library guide! This guide is designed to help you develop effective strategies for finding high-quality information in academic databases, saving you time and improving your research results.
Courtesy: LA City College, The Stryberg Library, and The Knowledge Network
Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) help students refine and structure their searches by combining or excluding keywords. They enable precise control over search results by narrowing or broadening the focus of the query.
Search: Impact of social media on mental health among university students.
This search strategy ensures you capture relevant articles that discuss either social media or social networking sites in relation to various mental health aspects, specifically within the university student population, while eliminating irrelevant results that might only focus on one of these concepts in isolation.
Truncation and wildcards enable students to broaden their searches by including various forms of a word or accommodating spelling variations. This technique is particularly useful when dealing with words that have multiple endings or alternative spellings.
Search: "Social media" AND mental* AND Behavio?r
Using phrase searching with quotation marks (" ") helps you find exact phrases or words that must appear together in that specific order, preventing the database from treating the words as separate concepts.
Search: Artificial Intelligence in Education.
Courtesy: Evelyn & Howard Boroughs Library
Field searching allows students to specify where they want their search terms to appear within a database entry (e.g., title, abstract, author). This targeted approach improves the relevance of search results by focusing on specific areas of interest.
By employing field searching, students can streamline their research process by retrieving only those articles that are most relevant to their specific interests, thus saving time and increasing the efficiency of their research efforts.
Proximity Searching
Use Filters and Limits
Leverage Subject Headings
Controlled Vocabulary
Search by Citation
Save Your Searches and Set Alerts
Your librarian will show you how to string the keywords or words under which you want to search together. These searches can be repeated on other databases as well.