Search Techniques & tips Tom Volkening, Engineering Librarian

People Studying In the Library Library Courtesy http://onthebanks. mdu

Some Search Techniques Truncation * Allows for searching of multiple words beginning with the same letters. For example: environ*= environment, environments, environmental, etc. Quotation Marks “…” Searches only for the exact phrase within the quotation marks. For example: “wastewater treatment” would not find treatment of wastewater. Commonly Used Search Connectors such as AND / OR / NOT Example: Bacteria OR Microbe would broaden the search results. Anaerobic AND Bacteria would narrow the search results. Bacteria NOT Aerobic would narrow the search results by eliminating results with the word Aerobic.

Before You Start Your Search Do you have enough information to understand the question you are being asked or to solve the problem you have been given? Think about what types of resources might be used to find the information you need. How much information will be enough? Be prepared to search a number of sources. What will you do if you don’t find the information you hoped to find?

The Search Select information resources based on the type of information you need. Tailor your search to the type of information resource you are using. Think about how your topic/question/problem could be divided into smaller parts. Think about what additional words might be used to describe your topic/question/problem. For many databases, begin your search with a few terms so that you are more likely to see a broad range of results. Look at the results of your initial search and if you are not finding enough information, be prepared to expand your results by adding alternative terms that you found in the results of your first search. If the results of the initial search are too broad, be prepared to narrow your search results by adding more terms using AND. If your search contains items that you are not interested in, you may be able to get more useful results by excluding items containg certain terms.