Passport 2024

Database Searching

You may be familiar with using search engines like Google to find information. A search engine will look at every word on every page of a document for your search terms. This can give some mixed results - you may find pages that are exactly about your topic or pages that only mention it once or twice. When you search in a library catalog or research database, the database does a more strategic search where it looks for your search terms in key parts of a document. Usually, it looks in the title, author, abstract, and subject terms (terms assigned by the publisher that identify what the document is about). This means you may need to use different strategies to search a database than you would with a search engine.

Keywords are terms we use when searching for information. By choosing your keywords strategically, you can maximize your search to make sure you're getting the information you want.

1. To identify keywords, start with your research topic or question. What are the key words or phrases in your question that sum up your topic? Write those words down. 
   • Example: What is the impact of social media on teenagers’ communication skills? 
   • From this research question, the words and phrases "impact," "social media," "teenagers," and "communication skills" are potential keywords.
2. Now, look at your keywords and think about what other words or phrases can be used to mean the same thing. 
   • For example, "impact" may also be called "effect," "influence," "outcome," or "result." If you're looking at social media, you may decide to include specific social media sites like Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok.
3. Think about what narrower or broader terms you can use. 
   • For the term "teenagers," you could also use the terms "youth" or "generation z" if you wanted to be more broad, or "teenage girls," "teenage boys," or "high school students" to get more narrow results.

You can use a chart like the ones linked below to help you organize and brainstorm your keywords.

You can use the words AND, OR, and NOT to combine your search terms for precise searching. These are called Boolean operators and each one has a different purpose.

• Use AND to combine your search terms. Each search result with include all of the terms. This can help narrow your results.
  • Searching for literature AND poetry will find results that include both literature and poetry. It will not show results that only include literature and it will not show results that only include poetry.
• Use OR to find results that contain at least one of your search terms. This can help you broaden your results, and can be good to use if the subject you're searching for is referred to in different ways.
  • Searching for literature OR poetry will show results that include either literature or poetry. Some results may only include literature, some may only include poetry, and some may include both.
• Use NOT to exclude terms from your results. This can help you narrow your topic by removing a related term that you are not interested in finding sources about.
  • Searching for literature NOT poetry will show results that only include literature and no results that include poetry. If a result includes both literature and poetry, it will not be included. 

The Venn diagrams below can help visualize how Boolean operators work. The purple shading represents what results will be shown in that search.