Searchers Toolkit, part 2

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Searchers Toolkit, part 2

• Proximity,limits, truncation, and your most
  important tool

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What this lecture will cover

• Proximity operators, and phrase searching
• Truncation, and wildcards
• Limits
• Ability to distinguish case in searching
• Pearl Growing a search strategy

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Basic Tool 4 Proximity Operators

• In addition to allowing you to specify that you
  want to search for items that mention both the
  word ducks AND the word geese, some systems
  also allow you to specify a relationship between
  those terms, e.g., how close to each other they
  appear in the text.
• This is known as proximity searching.

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Proximity Operators

• Proximity operators allow you to specify that
  termA appears within so many words of termB. Here
  are the 2 syntaxes EBSCO MasterFile
  usesteenagers N5 homeless - i.e., near
• teenagers must appear within 5 words of
  homeless in the text for a document to be
  retrieved. The terms can be in any order -
  teenagers first, or homeless first.
• homeless W3 teenagers - i.e. within
• homeless must appear within 3 words of
  teenagers, in that order homeless first, to
  be retrieved

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Proximity

• The more text a database has, the more important
  the ability to do proximity searching becomes.
• Why?

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Really close proximity Phrase Searching

• Searching on exact phrases can be extremely
  important in some cases, and the inability of
  some databases to do this (easily) can really
  inhibit how effectively you can search.
• What is the common way to do this on the Web?

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Basic Tool 5 Truncation

• Truncation allows you to search on a word stem
  and retrieve any word beginning with those
  letters, e.g.harmon
• retrieves harmony, harmonious, harmonica
• employ
• retrieves employee, employment, employer,
  employed

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Truncation symbols

• Vary somewhat from database to database.
• Common ones are and ? and !
• Factiva uses (unusual)
• Some dont offer a symbol, and simply search on a
  limited set of variants (e.g., plural forms)
  automatically
• Look for Help or Examples to determine how
  the database at hand handles truncation!

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Wildcards

• Closely related to truncation are wildcard
  symbols - is often used in this sense, to
  substitute for an exact number of letters
  (usually one)womn
• Retrieves woman, women, womyn
• Again, consult the Help to see if the database
  offers wildcarding capability, and which symbol
  is used.

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Limits constrain your search

• Limits - preset options to choose from to further
  define your search, such as
• Date
• Full text
• Scholarly (peer reviewed)
• Publication (newspaper, journal, etc.) or article
  type (review, editorial, etc.)
• Language

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One last search capability

• Think of this as the toothpick in the Swiss army
  knife - tiny but needed once in a great while
• CAPitalization - the ability to distinguish case.
• How does the database handle it, if at all?
  (Youll have to troll the help files - probably
  pretty thoroughly - to find the answer to this
  one)
• There are certain cases where the ability to
  search for the capitalized version is crucial
  otherwise youll get an incredible number of
  false drops (can you think of one?)

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A handy search strategy

• Pearl Growing
• This charming expression refers to the process of
  doing a very broad search first - high recall! -
  then examining the results, and finding subject
  headings, or discovering further terms to search
  on from the most on-target hits.
• This is very useful when you are venturing into a
  new database and/or unfamiliar subject matter.

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Your mental tools

• A healthy skepticism - peoples memories, and
  even references that have appeared in print - are
  not necessarily correct (gasp, really!)
• Willingness to let go - its ok not to use every
  bit of information a patron provides
• Maintain mental clarity and patience be
  systematic in your searching - pause and think,
  dont just type

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And thats your toolkit

• So now you have some concepts, some tools that
  youll use over and over, in various
  combinations. My advice, and the approach I will
  take throughout this class is
• Master the concepts. Do not attempt to memorize
  exactly which databases offer which capabilities.
  Instead

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Train Your Eyes!!

• Learn to scan the interface quickly. Look for
  Help or Search Guides. (Actually read them!)
  You now know what to look for - so just look for
  it. For you as a professional, nothing on that
  screen should be noise or ignored - your users
  wont see it, but you must. This is the most
  important thing you can do - LOOK with your
  trained eyes! Because

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Things Can Change at any Time

• Especially now that database vendors have moved
  their products to the Web,1 their interfaces have
  become ever more fluid, just like any other web
  page. I cannot emphasize this enough
• USE YOUR EYES
• They are the best tool you have. 2

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Social Science databases

• Introducing Library Literature and Information
  Science Full-Text
• Use your eyes! Think about your tools! Which ones
  (tools) are available here?