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When searching in a database you can get more relevant results by defining what you are looking for and using keywords wisely. Here are some useful tips.
When searching for information, the search terms you use make all the difference. They need to be broad enough to cover your research question, yet specific enough to reduce irrelevant hits. Finding information is a process, and we have listed a few tips and tools to help you find the terms to use.
By combining your standard search terms with the ones provided in a database thesaurus, you will have a better chance of finding relevant information.
Keep in mind that the same phenomenon can have different names in different subject areas.
A simple term might capture what you need, and there is no need to add extensions for that term unless you are looking for the extended term only, e.g. pig* covers both pig, pigs, pigeon, "domestic pig*" and "pig* in space" and any other words and phrases beginning with or containing pig.
Start with a few key articles and select relevant terms from the title, abstract, and keywords. Run a test search with these terms. If this captures other highly relevant articles, try to find more terms in them. Repeat as needed.
Here are some tools that can be useful for translating terms e.g. from Swedish to English:
Combine terms with the Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT.
When a combination of search terms turns out to be too broad and a specific phrase search is too narrow, proximity operators may come in handy to find articles where terms occur close to each other. The syntax for proximity searching differs between databases, so make sure to check the help files.
Use NEAR/x to find records where the terms are within a specified number of words of each other.
"agricultur* NEAR/5 challenge*" retrieves articles where the two words are found within 5 words from each other, regardless of the order of appearance.
NEAR without specified number searches within 15 words, which is approximately within a sentence.
You can choose between two Proximity operators:
By using truncation (shortening) you can search for various forms of a word. The symbol used for truncation varies in different databases, but it is often an asterisk (*) or sometimes a question mark (?).
"farm*" retrieves anything beginning with "farm", e.g. "farmer", "farmers", "farming".
Phrase searching can be used when searching for search terms consisting of more than one word, such as the name of an organization, an author, a long title, or a specific combination of terms. The search will only retrieve records with the words in exactly the specified order. Many search tools use quotation marks to denote a phrase, other tools offer a phrase search alternative directly in the menu.
"food safety" will find records with the terms in that exact order and spelling, but not records where the terms appears separately.
If you have more than one Boolean operator (AND, OR, NOT) in your search string, make sure to group the terms with parenthesis or place them in different search boxes.
In most databases, parentheses can be used to group terms and to express in what order the database should search the different terms and expressions. The parentheses tells the search engine to search the terms within them first, together, and then combine them with the terms outside of the parentheses.
Always use this possibility to control how your search terms relate to each other. An alternative is to write the different groups of terms in different search boxes.
Search for one terms group or aspect at the time, using OR, to make sure that all aspects/search blocks retrieve combinable hits. This allows you to adjust your search string if needed. The search history feature can be useful here as it provides an overview and the possibility to combine search sets in an effective way.
Search one aspect at the time:
Then combine the search blocks, using AND, either by entering all search terms within parentheses (Alt 1), or by by using the search sets number (Alt 2):
Many databases allows you to save your searches as alerts. Then you will get messages with updated results directly without having to check the database.
Note: You have to register an account and log in to the database to be able to save your searches.
SLU University Library
library@slu.se, 018-67 35 00
Addresses and opening hours