Required for all WRIT 101 sections beginning Fall 2023: Little Seagull Handbook, 4e. Can be purchased online or in the Cottage Bookstore.
This section of the LibGuide corresponds with Section R-1: Doing Research, Pages 116-128.
Now that you've brainstormed your topic, developed a search strategy by brainstorming keywords and identifying a database, it's time to start searching!
This page will provide you with an overview of basic search methods including:
This page of the guide will also provide you with an overview of searching two different platforms:
While these are just two examples, it is important to remember that the search skills you practice and learn about for these platforms and throughout this guide are transferrable to other databases. Tip: databases might look different, but they essentially function the same way.
Boolean operators are commands that instruct databases to use logic to limit, narrow, or broaden searches in order to find more relevant information. To use Boolean operators, you must type the operator in all capital letters.
Use the tabs above to learn about the following Boolean operators:
The Boolean operator AND will narrow your results by combining the terms and instructing the database to search for results containing both/all search terms present in the search string.
For example, if you wanted to learn more about how social media effects mental health, you could try a search like:
"social media" AND "mental health,"
which will instruct the database to search for results containing both terms.
The Boolean operator OR will increase your results by instructing the database to search for results containing either/any search terms present in the search string. This operator is beneficial when you want to make sure you are not missing results that contain synonyms for your search terms.
For example, let's say you're doing research on mood disorders and children. You could use the operator OR to search for synonyms to the word children:
children OR adolescents OR kids OR youth
Then, you could combine this using grouping to include mood disorders in your search:
(children OR adolescents OR kids OR youth) AND "mood disorders"
which will instruct the database to search for results containing any of the terms combined by OR plus the term "mood disorders."
The Boolean operator NOT will limit your results by instructing the database to exclude all keywords that follow the operator NOT in the search string.
For example, if you wanted to do research on social media, but didn't want information on Tik Tok, you could type the following search:
"social media" NOT "Tik Tok"
which will instruct the database to search for social media and exclude any results that contain the term Tik Tok.
To search for a phrase, type quotation marks around the phrase.
If you do not enclose the phrase in quotation marks, the system will find items that contain the individual words in the phrase, regardless of if these words are located next to each other in the order specified.
For example, to search for grey wolves as one term, type "grey wolves" into the search panel.
This search will return sources that reference grey wolves as a phrase. If you had not put grey wolves in quotation marks, you would get sources mentioning either the word grey, or the word wolves, but not necessarily the words combined together. This would lead you to get a significant amount of irrelevant results.
Academic Search Complete is one of our many academic databases that allows you to search a collection of online resources including journal articles, magazine articles, news articles, videos, recordings, and more.
The tutorial below provides an overview of searching Academic Search Complete; however, the search tips and strategies used in this database can be used in any academic database you search.
Please complete the following tutorial:
To search the library catalog, just type one or more words describing your topic into the main search bar. The library catalog will assume that you are searching for all of the words that you type, and will return results that contain all of the specified terms.
So for this search, Yellowstone National Park,
the catalog searches for item records containing those words together, or as close together as possible. These items are what are displayed in the search results list.
Each record in the search results list will have yellow underlined text, which shows you the terms relevant to your search. In the above results, the words Yellowstone and Yellowstone National Park are underlined, showing that those are the exact or close terms to the search terms you entered.
When using the library catalog, you can set your search scope to change the collections you are searching. The search scope is a drop down selection on the right hand side in the search bar.
Weaver Library's catalog has three different search scopes:
To search for a phrase, type quotation marks around the phrase.
If you do not enclose the phrase in quotation marks, the system will find items that contain the individual words in the phrase, regardless of if these words are located next to each other in the order specified.
For example, to search for grey wolves as one term, type "grey wolves" into the search panel:
In the first search result, the words grey wolves are located next to each other in a phrase and are underlined in yellow, showing that the search query pulled the item due to the phrase "grey wolves."
When searching an academic database, you can use search modifiers called Boolean operators that allow you to instruct the database to combine terms when searching. The Boolean operator AND instructs the database to search for both terms (think of it like math--in this case addition).
For example, if we type in the search bar:
children AND stress
we are instructing the database to search for sources that contain both keywords somewhere in the text of the document (title, abstract, body paragraphs). So for this search, we are asking the database to find articles and sources that mention both children and stress.
You can combine as many terms as you like using the operator AND. However, since the database will look for sources containing all the keywords combined by AND, it is possible to combine too many terms and come back with little to no results. Start by combining a couple of terms at a time and modify your search as needed based on your search results.
Tip: when you are searching with Boolean operators, always make sure the operator is in all caps.