SEARCHING STRATEGY - Universiti Teknologi...
Transcript of SEARCHING STRATEGY - Universiti Teknologi...
SEARCHING STRATEGY
PTAR Kampus Puncak Alamhttp://library.puncakalam.uitm.edu.my/
© Dikemaskini : Januari 2017
Unit Perkhidmatan AkademikPerpustakaan Tun Abd Razak (PTAR) Cawangan Selangor, Kampus Puncak Alam
PTAR UiTM Selangor
WHY?• To get relevant results• To save time going through irrelevant information• To go beyond Googling: retrieving anything andeverything
HOW?• Enable you to quickly retrieve relevant information
from the thousands of records in a database.• By using the following methods below you can make
your search statement specific and increase thechance of retrieving relevant information.
PTAR UiTM Selangor
3
Boolean Operators• or = any of the terms may be present• and = all terms must be present• not = excludes specific search term
using “and” operator narrows the search
PTAR UiTM Selangor
AND: is used to narrow your results. Focus thesearch when you have multiple search terms.
OR: is used to broaden the results by using twoor more similar concepts
NOT: narrows the search as you exclude certainconcepts
PTAR UiTM Selangor
Truncation: Truncation will help you find something if you don’t know
how to spell a word. Is a technique that broadens your search to include various
word endings and spellings. To make sure you get all variations of a word, use the
truncation symbol. In most databases, this symbol is an
asterisk *
PTAR UiTM Selangor
Truncation examples• International spellings
o theat* theater, theatre, ALSO theatrical• Various endings
o comput* computer, computing, computationo psycho* psychology, psychopathic,
psychopathology, psychotherapy• Use as many common letters as possible
o colon* colonoscopy, colonization, colon, colonyo coloni* colonization, colonies, colonialism
PTAR UiTM Selangor
Wildcard• Wildcards substitute a symbol for one letter of a word.• This is useful if a word is spelled in different ways, but still
has the same meaning.• For example: searching for educat* would tell the
database to look for all possible endings to that root.Results will include educate, educated, education,educational or educator.
• A question mark (?) may be used to represent a singlecharacter, anywhere in the word. It's most useful whenthere are variable spellings for a word, and you want tosearch for all variants at once.
• For example, searching for colo?r would return both colorand colour.
PTAR UiTM Selangor
Wildcard Symbols
? = Match exactly one letter
# = Match zero or one letter
* = Match multiple letters
PTAR UiTM Selangor
Wildcard Examples• Match multiple letters• International spellings
o orthop*dic orthopedic, orthopaedic• Related concepts
o psych*y psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy,psychopathy
• Replace entire wordo “A Midsummer * dream” A midsummer night’s dream
PTAR UiTM Selangor
Phrase Searching:• Phrase Searching means searching for two or more words
as an exact phrase.• Phrase searching is achieved by putting quotation marks
around the phrase. The search engine/online database willreturn only hits that have the exact phrase with the wordsin the exact order.
Example:
fever treatment
“fever treatment”
‘fever treatment’
PTAR UiTM Selangor
Advanced Searching : Helps you to narrow your searchand access more relevant results.
PTAR UiTM Selangor
Field Search / SearchLimiters
Common fields include: Author, title, journal title, abstract,publisher, date/year of publication, subject/descriptor
• The same applies on search engines, fields: web,images, news, maps etc.
• Search limiters (sometimes called Filters) are powerfulways to focus your search results so that you don’t haveto look through lots of irrelevant items to find what you’relooking for.
PTAR UiTM Selangor
• Formulate search query using Boolean, Truncation,Wildcards, etc.
• Sort by relevance• Refine search (e.g. narrow down the results)• Mark• Save Results• Download more than 1 PDF at one time
Online Database Search Tips
PTAR UiTM Selangor