Topic 3: Search Strategies

From this topic, i have learnt how to use AND,OR,NOT. I have learnt also about truncation and wildcards, and phrase searching. Now i would like to write reflection about it.

Boolean operators determine what terms should and should not be present in records that are retrieved.  Using Boolean terms makes your search more precise by retrieving results more relevant to your topic.

• AND retrieves documents containing both terms

• Zinc AND colds

• OR retrieves documents containing either term

• teenagers OR adolescents OR children

• NOT excludes documents containing the specified term

 • Harriet Tubman NOT juvenile.

Truncation and Wildcards

•Truncation and wildcards broaden your search capabilities by allowing you to retrieve multiple spellings of a root word or word stem, such as singular and plural forms.

Example: teen* will return teen, teens, teenage, teenager, etc.)

•A wildcard is a special character, such as an asterisk (*), question mark (?), or pound sign (#), that replaces one or more letters in a word. Truncation is using a wildcard at the end of a root word to search multiple variations of that root word. Check a database's help section to identify what symbol is used for a wildcard.

•Example: wom?n will return woman, women, and womyn.

Phrase searching:

Phrase searching is when you use a string of words (instead of a single word) to search with.

    Some databases will use the inverted commas and others the brackets. Look at the "Help" function of each database to see what you should use for that particular database.

     Not all databases allow phrase searching. Look at the "Help" function of the database to find out.