Writing a Search Statement: More advanced search techniques

In addition to using boolean logic when creating your search statement, there are some additional techniques you will want to use when searching. Many databases, and some internet search engines, will give you the option of using a Basic (or Quick) or an Advanced (or More Options) search form. Usually the Advanced search option will give you additional search options, such as allowing you to limit your search by date or document type, and give you more control over your search.

Field Searching

You can make your search strategy even more specific by searching for information in specific fields within the database. You will need to know which fields are searchable for the particular database you are using, but in most cases, at least the author and title fields will be searchable.

For example, you know that Mr. Anderson wrote an article and the word "accountability" is in the article title but you don’t know in which journal the article was published. You can indicate that you want to find the term Anderson in the author field and the term Accountability in the article title field. Your search statement would look something like this:

au=anderson AND ti=accountability

Or, if you know that Dr. Thiede wrote an article in Journal of Education Psychology but you do not know the title of the article, you can enter:

au=thiede and so=journal of educational psychology (so is the field code for source)

How you construct a field search - do you type au= or au() or fill in a form? - and which fields are searchable will depend on the database itself. Please see the online help for the database you are using for information on how to do field searches within a certain database.

Above is an example of the advances search screen for the CSA databases. You can select a specific field to search from the drop-down menu and enter your search terms and synonyms into the blanks.

Some databases also have additional special fields, such as publication type or target audience to help you locate materials written for a particular audience or using specific research methodology. Look in the help documentation for the database to see what other fields may be available for searching.

Truncation

Truncation refers to using a symbol, usually an * or ? , to indicate that you want to find all the variations of that term.

For example, if you want to find psychology, psychologist and psychological you could combine all three terms with an OR, or you could truncate the term psycholog* and have the system search for all words beginning with psycholog, such as psychology, psychologist, psychological, etc.

Using truncation can save you some typing but be aware that you may pick up some terms you did not intend to search for. For example, you may ask the system to search for comput*, thinking that you will retrieve computer and computers. But, you will also find records containing computational and computing, which may not have been your intention.

Truncation symbols vary depending on the database and not all databases or search interfaces allow for truncation. Check the online help documentation or ask a librarian for assistance.

Phrase Searching

Some search engines or search interfaces will also allow you to search for phrases by putting the terms in "quotation marks". For example, if you want to search for the phrase computer aided design, you can place quotation marks around it so the system will look for those three terms together. You can also combine phrase searches with boolean operators.

Using other limiters

Many databases will allow you to limit your search results by year or a range of years, by language or by document type.

Last Updated 09/09/2004