| There are three basic types of searches:
Advanced searching is covered in another area. |
There are several things you can do in these searches:
|
In a keyword search, the computer looks for the exact words you type in the search box. It doesn't matter whether a keyword is a name, a subject, part of the title, or shows up in an abstract -- the computer looks for your chosen words, no matter where they appear in the record. In a keyword search, you can type the words in any order you choose.
The keyword search will appear when you first choose a database or group of
databases.
To do a search by keyword,
See Seeing Your Search Results to learn more about what happens after you click Go!
Author searching allows you to search for items by a particular author or group. To do an author search,
The database will return a list of items by any author or authors with the name you typed.
See Seeing Your Search Results to learn more about what happens after you click Go!
A database may contain full text articles, but not all records in that database
will lead to full text. Any database with a 
or an asterisk (*) next to its name on the search screen contains some full
text.
You can limit your search to those records that have full text.
From the keyword search screen (or title, author, or advanced screens),
|
 |
If full text is not available in the database you chose, you will not see the "Limit search by: Full Text Only" option.
See Getting Started -- Selecting an Individual Database for more information.
Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) allow you to refine and define your search statement .
AND--searches for both of the words you type in. AND is good for joining concepts together and for narrowing a search. For instance, if you were doing research on "How gun control impacts crime." You would want to combine gun control with crime. Type: gun control and crime
OR--searches for either word you type in and therefore broadens and enlarges your search results. OR is good for searching synonyms. If you were doing research on the history of guns. You might want to search for a synonym of guns, which is firearms. Type: guns or firearms
NOT -- You would use NOT in your search statement to eliminate resources or articles which are not of interest to you. For instance, if you were doing research on guns, but did not want articles on assault weapons, you would want to exclude assault from your search statement. Type: gun not assult
You must be careful when using NOT. You might want to include the word you are excluding if it has another meaning. For instance, you might be interested in assaults that have occurred with guns but not assault weapons. If you exclude the word assault, you will exclude it in all its meanings.
Nesting is using two or more Boolean operators in a single search statement. The items being combined need to be put in parentheses. To get records that have either the word firearms or the word guns and then limit those records to just those that have the word crime, your search sentance would look like: (firearms or guns) and crime.
Truncation allows you to search for a term and its different variations. To do this, you type in the root of the word, then put an asterisk at the end of it. For example, educat* will retrieve records that contains educate, education, educating, etc.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
in the drop down menu