CHABOT LIBRARY
 · 
  ·   ·   · 

Library Research: Your Search Strategy
  1. Before beginning your research, try to come up with a topic:

    2.  

     

  2. When you come up with a topic (ex. "civil disobedience"), try to then narrow down the topic. (example: Thoreau's and Martin Luther King's acts on "Civil disobedience"):

    3.  

     
     
     
     

  3. Sometimes you may need to be more specific.   (If you're searching all sorts of theories on Howard Gardner's Education Theories you may want to specify particular key terms of a particular theory, such as "the development of a person's natural abilities")

    4.  

     
     
     
     

  4. Come up with a research question (state it in a sentence).   (Example: What similarities and differences are there between Thoreau's, King's (and another noteworthy individual's) approach to "civil disobedience?")

    5.  

     
     
     
     
     

  5. To search your topic effectively, come up with search terms. You will need to use these search terms to search a database effectively (examples: civil disobedience, situational ethics; education; Chabot College; California State University, Hayward; King, Martin Luther; Thoreau, Henry)

    6.  

     
     
     
     

  6. Come up with related terms to your topic. They can be synonyms, broader/narrower terms. Terms somehow related to your subject. (Examples: protest; rebellion; higher education; primary education; schools; protestors;  Government, Resistance To; Ethics)

    7.  

     
     
     

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:
civil disobedience and martin luther king Database searches for instances where civil disobedeince AND Martin Luther King appear
college OR university Database searches for instances where EITHER the words college OR university appear. Both CAN appear or just one of them.
martin luther king NOT protestant Database finds all instances where martin luther king appears but ONLY WHEN the word protestant does not (say all you kept getting was Martin Luther, the founder of the "Protestant Movement")

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:
 +"civil disobedience" +"martin luther king"
 +gardner +schools		 A "plus" sign is used to tell the database that the words MUST appear within the web pages you are searching.
 +"martin luther" -"protestant movement" A "minus" sign is used to tell the database that the phrase martin luther  MUST appear but ONLY WHEN protestant movement does not. 
 "civil disobedience"
"Chabot College"
"Martin Luther King"		 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 civil OR disobedience, and anywhere these words appear on a web page, meaning a lot of non-relevant results!