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Library & Information Research LIS 1002: Search Tips

This course is designed to develop information literacy skills and to help students become full participants in all the information available to them. It introduces students to the core concepts of information retrieval, research and writing papers.

Search Tips

  • See this example search using many of the search techniques below.

  • Use key search terms instead of a string of words or a question. Avoid stop words, like articles (i.e., a, an, the) & most prepositions.  
  • When your search includes a phrase, such as solar energy, put quotation marks around the words that make up the phrase. 
    Click here for a short video on phrase searching.


  • Use Boolean operators (and, or, not) to connect, expand, or exclude keywords. See this video for more details on Boolean operators.


  • Use controlled vocabulary built in to databases--often called Subject Headings, Subject Terms, or Related Terms--to navigate intelligently through records in the database. See here for more information on controlled vocabulary. Incidentally, you may use controlled vocabulary without even knowing you do with Web 2.0 features, such as Twitter Hashtags or Flickr Tagclouds.

Talking to Databases

http://goo.gl/8vNH8
  • Use a truncation (sometimes referred to as wildcard) search. In most databases, you use an asterisk to find all words with the same root (prefix) but different endings (suffix).  For example, the search term teen* will locate the following terms:

    teen
    teen    s
    teenager
    teenagers
    teenaged
    teensy
    teeny
     
  • Understand the differences among the types of publications available and make sure you are using the right type to meet the requirements for your paper. For instance, news sources, often called popular sources, offer current events information, while peer-reviewed journals (scholarly sources) provide in-depth analysis on specialized topics.
  • When searching on the Web using Google, restrict the top-level domain to .gov and .edu. Domains ending in .com are usually out to market something, and domains ending in .org  often strongly advocate a single position.  In Google, you can search for a top-level domain by adding, to the end of your keyword search, the term site: followed by the top-level domain.
    • For example, to perform a search of United States government sites on the topic of video games and their relation to children, you would enter the following:

      video games children site:.gov      . 

    • You may also want to look at Google Advanced Search for a simplified way to perform a domain search.