Searching Electronic Databases

Library Tutorial - Searching Electronic Databases - Keyword Searching

The easiest way to do a search is to type a word or two into the search box and see if you get any results. This is called keyword, or free text, searching. The database looks at the text you typed into the box and gives you the records that contain that text, usually within its title or abstract.

If you typed in the word dog, the database might retrieve the following article titles:

Iraq: the politics of dog food
Man gets 3-year term for dog’s death
Rumors of drug use still dog Armstrong

The first two articles are clearly about the animal, while the third uses the word dog as a verb. The database does not assign meaning to the words you type in; all it can do is match strings of letters. Such searches gather many results, but some of them may be irrelevant.

Choosing Keywords

The success of your search depends on the keywords you choose. If you use a very common word, you may retrieve too many records. If you put in an obscure term, you may get too few. The number of keywords you use may have a great impact on your results as well. The more keywords you use, the fewer records you will retrieve.

Example topic: Are dogs smarter than cats?

If you try to type in the complete sentence Are dogs smarter than cats? into the search box, the database will look for an article that has all of these words, and perhaps in that exact order. Remember, its whole goal is to match text. Instead, you should use keywords- those words we want to appear in the title or abstract of the article. Dogs, cats, and smarter are keywords.

But wait, we are not done! What about article titles such as these:

Canine vs. feline: who is the smartest?
Cat and Dog IQ's

These are applicable articles, but by restricting our search to just the keywords dogs, cats, and smarter, we would not retrieve them. When conducting keyword searches, it is necessary to use synonyms (doggie, canine, puppy) and variations of words (smart, smarter, smartest, smartness, etc.)

Truncation

One way to retrieve variations of words is to use truncation, usually with a dollar sign or asterisk. For example, if you type dog*, the database would look for d-o-g and anything that starts with those letters: e.g. dogs, doggie, dogged, dogging. Truncation is an excellent way to find variations of words, but may also give you irrelevant words. If you type cat*, you will not only get cat and cats, but catastrophe, catalog, category, etc.

Combining Search Words

Let's say you type the words body image into a search box. What happens then? It depends on the database!

1. Some databases, like Expanded Academic ASAP, look for the phrase body image exactly as you typed:

The effect of television on body image
Body image and anorexia
Governing body image reflects low popularity

This is known as an adjacency search: the database assumes that since you typed the words next to one another, you wish to retrieve articles that do the same. Sometimes it is necessary to put a search in quotes ("body image"), indicating you wish to search it as a phrase.

2. Some databases retrieve any records which contain the word body and the word image appeared in a record- but not necessarily next to one another:

Ads refresh brand image: updating bath and body product line
Self-image and body-esteem
Image of the body in Celtic literature

In this example, the database assumes you want both words, but gives no importance to the order in which you type them. If you want your search to find records in this way, it may be necessary to use the word AND in between your terms (body AND image).

Remember the more terms you put into your search, the smaller your set of results will be. If you search for body AND image AND Hispanic AND girls, you are requiring that all of these words be present somewhere in the record of an article. An article entitled Hispanic and Asian girls' body image differences has all four words and would be retrieved. An article entitled Body image among Mexican women would not; it is missing Hispanic and girl.

You can also combine words using OR. In the previous search, you typed Hispanic but now you would like to include other names for this group. Hispanic OR Latina OR Latino OR Chicano will give you results that use any of these words. Using OR always makes your set larger, as it provides the database with different options:

Body image in Hispanic teenage girls
Latinas fight for healthy body image
Body image in the Latino community

Combining your search words with AND, OR and NOT (which excludes a word or concept) is known as Boolean searching.

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