Searching the Web Very exciting stuff

How Can I Refine My Searches? Wording: Task words provide instructions on how to approach an assignment e.g. “critically analyse”, compare, discuss, evaluate. Keywords convey the significant meaning of a topic e.g. “computer technology”. Context words are considered when choosing and evaluating resources e.g. “profound and irreversible” and “aspects of daily life”.

How Can I Refine My Searches? If the search is too broad; it gives far too many results. We need to develop a search strategy to: • narrow the search • obtain less but more relevant results

The brainstorm includes the following: • abbreviations e.g. email • plurals e.g. social aspects • acronyms e.g. www • spelling variations e.g. socialise, socialize • different endings of a root word e.g. communicate, communication • synonyms e.g. internet, world wide web

Keyword searching Individual items in a library catalogue or journal database are known as records. Each record contains a number of fields, most of which can be searched. Keyword searching is very powerful because it searches all fields simultaneously, unlike author, title or subject searches which search only in the specified field. Use keyword searching when: combining more than one topic or aspect of a topic simultaneously searching all fields of a record the exact title or author of an item is not known

Keyword Search: Boolean Connectors A great advantage of keyword searching is the ability to combine more than one keyword in a search. To do this effectively, there are a number of techniques that need to be understood and used. AND, OR, and NOT are the three connectors, known as Boolean operators, used to join two or more keywords, because computers cannot interpret natural language. Nesting and truncation are techniques used to enhance keyword searching

Nesting Function: specifies the order of the search. It is required when a search contains two or more different connectors. Brackets are used to group related keywords, connected by OR. The computer searches for the nested keywords first.

Keyword search tool: truncation Function: Retrieves all variations of a root word in a single search, by using a special symbol to replace the word endings. This broadens the search. The truncation symbol is often a question mark ? or an asterisk *. Keywords may have: • different word endings but the same root• singular and plural word forms• spelling variations• variations in tense. Take care to truncate keywords appropriately e.g. flow? will retrieve variations of the keywords flower and flow.