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This video tutorial will show you some advanced search techniques for library databases.
When you are entering keywords, there are a few search tips you should know. This database
gives you the option on the second search line to enter two words connected by or. I
can enter “women” and “mothers” in these two boxes, and I will retrieve articles
that use the word “women” and articles that use the word “mothers”. This is helpful
if there are different terms that mean similar things for your topic. In other databases,
I can use the drop down menu options to search for similar terms like “women or mothers”
or “teenagers or adolescents”. I can also use or within one search line, and use the
second row for a different term (show education). I can also use or within one search line to
do this type of search, so that I can use “and” to connect “teenagers or adolescents”
with another search term. I can also use an asterisk in one of my search terms to truncate
the word. This means that the search will look for the beginning of the word I’ve
typed in, and retrieve articles with any possible ending for that word. So searching e-d-u-c-*
will retrieve education, educating, educators, and so on.
Some databases will tag articles that are about similar topics with Subject terms or
Subject Headings. Clicking a subject heading that is related to your research will take
you to all of the articles that have been tagged with that subject heading. So if I
click Academic Achievement, United States in Project Muse, there are 122 articles on
this subject. Clicking this link again will take me to those articles. Doing the same
search in Criminal Justice Periodicals will give me different results because there are
different articles in this database. In this database, suggested subjects appear at the
top of my results. However, if I click one of these subjects, I will start a new search
using just that subject, so I may want to look at the list of results that came up first
to see if there are articles that are useful. Each specific article in this database will
also be tagged with its own subjects. When I click the title to view more information
about this article, I can see the subjects listed at the bottom of the article. I can
click one of these to go to all of the articles about this subject.
Remember that in order to read an entire article, you should look for a full-text link. If there
is no full-text link, you can use the Periodical Locator link or Journal search on the library
homepage to see if the article is available in another database. Sometimes the full-text
link will just say PDF, but this will take you to a PDF version of the article, exactly
as it appeared in print. If an article is not available full-text in our library, you
can request it through interlibrary loan. A final tool you should be aware of is the
ability to save articles in a database. In most databases, you can mark and save articles
temporarily, so that you can look at all of your favorite results at once. Some databases
will allow you to create an account so that you can save articles and go back to them
at any time by logging into your account. This is particularly helpfully if you are
doing a lot of research over a long period of time.
You may also be able to mark off several articles to send those articles to your email. From
a screen like this, I can mark a couple of articles to save to My Research. When I click
My Research, I can log in to my account so that these articles will be saved the next
time I come back to this database. Although this video tutorial demonstrated
how to do advanced searching in four specific databases, the tips and techniques can be
used in nearly any library database you search. Every database will have a Help link somewhere
on the page. The information in the help sections can be very valuable, especially if you find
that you are using one database for much of your research. Take time to get to know the
specifics about that database, and you will be researching like an expert.