Friday 19 July 2013

Search Strategies

Examples of subject headings are:
Library Subject Headings: Used as the "official vocabulary" of the Libraries catalog as well as many other library catalogs.
Science Subject Headings: Used to describe the content of documents in the Library at AIU as well as in catalogs of other medical and health sciences libraries.

Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms: This controlled vocabulary is used by American Psychological Association indexers to describe the content of documents in the database.  These subject headings are sometimes called index terms or descriptors.  The library has copies of the printed volume and the thesaurus is also available online, searchable from within the database.

Boolean Searching
Boolean searching allows you to group words together in an electronic database or environment such as the World Wide Web to receive a number of different types of results. Depending how you group these word, you will receive different results.



For example:
      By using an AND & NOT between words you limit the search.
      By placing an OR between words it expands the search.
      When you use OR you receive more information because the search engine is looking for two words rather than just one word.



Truncation and Wildcards
•    Truncation and wildcards broaden your search capabilities by allowing you to retrieve multiple spellings of a root word or word stem, such as singular and plural forms.

•    A wildcard is a special character, such as an asterisk (*), question mark (?), or pound sign (#), that replaces one or more letters in a word. Truncation is using a wildcard at the end of a root word to search multiple variations of that root word. Check a database's help section to identify what symbol is used for a wildcard.



Phrase Searching
      Phrase searching is when you use a string of words (instead of a single word) to search with.
      By using phrase searching you will retrieve fewer results

Example:

“information literacy"

            or
(information literacy)

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