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. "Women in Kate Chopin's fiction"), try to then narrow down the topic. (example: "Role of women in society in Kate Chopin's fiction"):

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  3. Sometimes you may need to be more specific. (i.e. what status does women in have in American society as a wife?  As an artist?  Or what attitudes does the elite American Southern culture have towards women in the late 19th century?)

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  4. Come up with a research question (state it in a sentence). Example:  What is Kate Chopin's view of what a woman is vs. how American Southern society viewed a woman in the late 19th century?

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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: Chopin, Kate;  The Awakening, Desiree's Baby, women, characters, American South)

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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: Edna Pontellier, 19th century women authors, American women authors, feminism, United States, Literature, characterization )

 

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:
 
Chopin Kate AND women  Database searches for instances where Kate Chopin AND women appear
character OR characterization Database searches for instances where EITHER the words Character OR characterization appear. Both CAN appear or just one of them.
Awakening NOT great Database finds all instances where Awakening appears but ONLY WHEN the word Great does not (thus, not getting books or articles on "The Great Awakening"

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:
 
 +"kate chopin" +awakening
 +"kate chopin" +"treatment of women"		 A "plus" sign is used to tell the database that the words MUST appear within the web pages you are searching.
 +awakening -great
 		 A "minus" sign is used to tell the database that the word water MUST appear but ONLY WHEN air does not. 
 "Kate Chopin"
"A Pair of Silk Stockings"
"Desiree's Baby"
"Woman Authors"
"Edna Pontellier"		 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 Kate OR Chopin.  And anywhere these words appear on a web page, meaning a lot of non-relevant results!