Philosophy: Searching

                                   Accessing Library Resources Outside the Campus

A search strategy is an organised structure of key terms used to search a database. The search strategy combines the key concepts of your search question in order to retrieve accurate results.

Databases are provided on different interfaces. Most of them support the following functions:

• Advanced Search screen provides options for combining your keywords.
• Combine keywords using appropriate Boolean Operators (drop down menu):
  • AND - to combine/narrow down; OR - to broaden; NOT - to exclude terms.
• Use synonyms, alternative terms, phrases and variations in spelling.
• Use truncation at the end of your term (*) to find variations of your search term
• If you want words to appear next to each other in an exact phrase, use quotation marks (" ")
• You can specify how close two words appear together in your search strategy. This can make your results more relevant; generally the closer two words appear to each other, the closer the relationship is between them. Commands for adjacency searching differ among databases, so make sure you consult database guides.
• Use citation searching to find articles that have been cited by other publications. You can use cited reference searching in:
  • Web of Science
  • Scopus
  • Google Scholar
• Refine results by subjects, controlled vocabulary, publication year ...
• Select/Mark relevant references and display results.
• Save, E-mail or Export selected references.