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Library Research: Your Search Strategy

1. Before beginning your research, try to come up with a topic:

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

2. When you come up with a topic (ex. "Mono Lake," "Endangered Species Act,"), try to then narrow down the topic. (example: "Restoration of Mono Lake," "Endangered Species Act and economic factors"):

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

3. Sometimes you may need to be more specific. (i.e. if writing on the changes of the San Francisco Bay's environment-- over what time period (ten years? 150 years?) Writing about the shores?  The water quality?  Animal/plant life?  Overall ecology? )

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

4. Come up with a research question (state it in a sentence). Examples: What is being done to restore Mono Lake?  Should the Endangered Species Act be amended to include evonomic factors?  How has the enivronment of the San Francisco Bay changed over the past ten years?

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

5. To search your topic effectively, come up with search terms. You will need to use these search terms to search a database effectively (example: Mono Lake, restoration)

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

6. Come up with related terms to your topic. They can be synonyms, broader/narrower terms. Terms somehow related to your subject. (Examples: environment, lakes in California, clean up)

Now, you are ready to phrase a search statement. You must phrase it so a database will know whether you want all your search terms, either one or the other, or to eliminate instances where a particular word or phrase exists:
 

Endangered Species Act AND economic factors	Database searches for instances where Enangered Specis Act and economic factors MUST appear
Restoration OR Restoring	Database searches for instances where EITHER the phrases Restoration OR Restoring appear. Both CAN appear or just one of them.
water pollution NOT air	Database finds all instances where water pollution appears but ONLY WHEN the word protestant does not

Notice that the search statements depend on an OPERATOR to basically give the database a command as to how it should perform its search based on the terms entered: (AND, OR, NOT). This is pertinent.

Once you have come up with a SEARCH STATEMENT, you are now ready to perform searches on the Library Catalog, our periodicals databases, and our other databases.

When using search engines to search the World Wide Web, search statements you enter are slightly different. Take notice:
 
 

+lake +pollution  +"endangered species act" +"economic factors"	A "plus" sign is used to tell the database that the words MUST appear within the web pages you are searching.
+water -air  "endangered species act" -plant	A "minus" sign is used to tell the database that the word water MUST appear but ONLY WHEN air does not.
"Endangered Species Act"  "water pollution"  "restoration of Mono Lake"	In most search engines, you MUST surround your phrase with quotation marks. Most search engines treat each word separately. If there were no quotes, the search engine will likely find pages that EITHER have the words "endangered," "species," OR "act." And anywhere these words appear on a web page, meaning a lot of non-relevant results!