CHABOT LIBRARY
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Library Research: Your Search Strategy


  1. Before beginning your research, try to come up with a topic:
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  2. When you come up with a topic (ex. "gun control"), try to then narrow down the topic. (example: "Attitudes toward guns and gun control" or "Does the idea of Gun Control violate the second amendment as written or intended?"):
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  3. Sometimes you may need to be more specific.   (Perhaps if there seems so much written about attitudes about gun control, maybe you'd be interested how men or women view gun control, those from a particular social class, those who live in urban vs. rural areas, etc.)
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  4. Come up with a research question (state it in a sentence).   (Example: Does gun control deter crime in urban areas in the United States?)

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  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: gun control, firearms--law and legislation (typical subject heading for "gun control"), United States, cities, crime
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  6. Come up with related terms to your topic. They can be synonyms, broader/narrower terms. Terms somehow related to your subject. (Examples: gun laws, North America, urban areas, lawlessness )



     

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:
 
gun control AND United States Database searches for instances where gun control AND United States appear
guns OR firearms Database searches for instances where EITHER the words guns OR firearms appear. Both CAN appear or just one of them.
gun control NOT brady Database finds all instances where gun control appears but ONLY WHEN the word Brady does not (say all you kept getting was the Brady Bill/Law and you wanted other bills/laws)

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:
 
 +"gun control" +"second amendment"
 +guns +restrictions +laws		 A "plus" sign is used to tell the database that the words MUST appear within the web pages you are searching.
 +"gun control" -brady A "minus" sign is used to tell the database that the phrase gun control  MUST appear but ONLY WHEN Brady does not. 
 "gun control"
 "gun lobby"
 "Second Amendment to the United States Constitution"		 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!