Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Search Techniques
Search Techniques
Introduction
This section describes some important methods you can use to search efficiently and effectively.
It gives you guidance on:
Contents
Search operators
a wild card symbol replaces a single letter - useful to retrieve alternative spellings and
simple plurals
eg wom?n will find woman or women
a truncation symbol retrieves any number of letters - useful to find different word
endings based on the root of a word
eg Africa* will find Africa, african, africans, africaans
eg agricultur* will find agriculture, agricultural, agriculturalist
Important hint! Check the online help screens for details of the symbols recognized by the
database you are searching - not all databases use the ? and * symbols.
In this example the shaded area contains records with both women and Africa in the text.
In this example the shaded area contains records with women, or gender, or both words in
the text.
In this example the shaded area indicates that only records containing just Africa will be
retrieved (not those with both Africa and Asia)
Beware! By using this operator you might exclude relevant results because you will lose
those records which include both words.
Words representing the same concept should be bracketed and linked with OR
eg (women or gender)
This is an example search statement bringing together all the techniques described above:
(wom?n or gender) and agriculture* and Africa*
Searches enclosed within brackets will be performed first and their results combined with the
other searches.
This is how the search would look when entered into the CAB Abstracts database
Many databases offer other more advanced features which you can use to refine your searches
further. These techniques include:
Search sets
Your results are displayed as "sets", which can be combined with other searches or new
words.
Field-specific searching
Most database records are made up of different fields (eg author, title etc.). Field-specific
searching allows you to select a particular field in which to search, rather than performing
a keyword search across all fields. Some databases allow you to type words into specific
search boxes, whereas in others you will need to type in the field name or its code.
Hint! Check help screens for field names or codes, and other hints on searching specific
fields.
by date
by language
by publication type (eg journal articles, chapters in books, review articles that provide
detailed summaries of research, book reviews)