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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. "agent orange"), try to then narrow down the topic. (example: "Affect of agent orange on Vietnam Veterans"):

 

 
 
 
 
 
 

3. Sometimes you may need to be more specific.   (The controversy over vietnam veterans affected by agent orange)

 

 
 
 
 
 
 

4. Come up with a research question (state it in a sentence).   (Example: What were the social controversies surrounding vietnam veterans affected by agent orange?)

 

 
 
 
 
 
 

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: agent orange, vietnam war, veterans, controversy)

 

 
 
 
 
 

6. Come up with related terms to your topic. They can be synonyms, broader/narrower terms. Terms somehow related to your subject. (Examples: herbicides, herbicidal warfare, vietnamese conflict, dioxin)

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:
 

agent orange AND veterans	Database searches for instances where agent orange AND veterans appear
agent orange OR herbicidal warfare vietnam war OR vietnamese conflict	Database searches for instances where EITHER the phrases agent orange OR herbicidal warfare appear. Both CAN appear or just one of them.
orange NOT fruit	Database finds all instances where orange appears but ONLY WHEN the word fruit 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:
 

+"agent orange" +"vietnam veterans"  +herbicides +vietnam	A "plus" sign is used to tell the database that the words MUST appear within the web pages you are searching.
+orange -fruit -color	A "minus" sign is used to tell the database that the word orange MUST appear but ONLY WHEN fruit does not.
"agent orange" "Vietnam War" "United States"	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 agent OR orange.  And anywhere these words appear on a web page, meaning a lot of non-relevant results!