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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. "gangs"), try to then narrow down the topic. (example: "gang violence" or "what motivates adolescents to want to join gangs?"):

 

 
 
 
 
 

3. Sometimes you may need to be more specific.   (If you want to especially know about gangs in the Northern California Bay Area, you may want to state California or Hayward or the Bay Area into the mix).

 

 
 
 

4. Come up with a research question (state it in a sentence).   (Example: "Is it because there is a lack of family structure that youths join gangs?" or "Is chemical dependency on drugs a factor in gang violence?")

 

 
 
 
 
 

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: gangs, violence, juvenile crime, United States, Hayward).

 

 
 
 
 

6. Come up with related terms to your topic. They can be synonyms, broader/narrower terms. Terms somehow related to your subject. (Examples: youth gangs, juvenile gangs, gang members, fights,, North America, California, Bay Area, San Francisco Metropolitan Area)

 

 
 
 

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:
 

gangs AND California	Database searches for instances where gangs AND California appear
juvenile gangs OR youth gangs	Database searches for instances where EITHER the terms juvenile gangs OR youth gangs appear. Both CAN appear or just one of them.
gangs NOT musical	Database finds all instances where gangs appears but ONLY WHEN the word musical does not (say all you kept getting was the musical, "West Side Story")

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:
 

+"juvenile crime" +"gang violence"  +gangs +psychology	A "plus" sign is used to tell the database that the words MUST appear within the web pages you are searching.
+gangs -musical	A "minus" sign is used to tell the database that the word gangs  MUST appear but ONLY WHEN musical does not.
"gang violence"  "juvenile crime" "school violence" "juvenile gangs" "causes of gang violence"	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 gun OR control  And anywhere these words appear on a web page, meaning a lot of non-relevant results!