Knowing strategies to research more efficiently and effectively is a core component of information literacy, which the Seth Wilson Library hopes to help you develop during your tenure here. Many of the strategies listed below are easy to incorporate into your search, and for the most part involves simply altering your verbiage when searching a database.
- Use your filters! When searching a database, make sure to use the filters available to refine your search. For example, if you know you are looking for an ebook, there is no need to sort through thousands of physical holdings or journal results. You can filter by type of resource, publication date, peer review, location, etc. To further refine your search, use the "Advanced Search" option in conjunction with the strategies listed below.
- Boolean Operators
- Boolean Operators(AND, OR, NOT) help to broaden, narrow, or refine a search. Watch the video above to see how Boolean Operators work and when to use them.
- Truncation
- Truncation involves searching using the root of the word to increase your results. Truncation is especially helpful in the beginning stages of research before your topic becomes more refined and you are acquiring general knowledge about your topic. For example, if you were interested broadly in psychology and children, you could search using psychol* and child*and this would produce results covering the spectrum(psychology, psychologist, psychological, psycholinguistics, child, children, childhood, etc.).
- Source Mining
- Source mining involves pulling quality resources from material related to your topic. If, for example, you found a reference book that was helpful, check the back of the index for additional sources. Any resource you use should have a bibliography that you can use to find other sources about your topic. This is especially helpful if you are researching more of a niche topic and are experiencing difficulty finding quality and relevant material as once you find one, it can lead to many others.
- Controlled Vocabularies
- Controlled vocabularies(also known as subject headings) are standardized terms that are indexed in databases. This means that when you search by a controlled vocabulary, relevant sources are "tagged" by the terms you are using, as they are defined by the exact same set of terms. Rather than searching by keywords, searching by a controlled vocabulary will yield consistent and targeted results. For example, if you just typed in Bible and Greek, you would get over 50,000 results on EBSCO on a variety of topics and intersections between the Bible and Greek. If you used a controlled vocabulary and searched Biblical languages--Greek, you would get 3,000 targeted results. If you search psychology and kids, as kids is not a proper subject heading, you would only receive results with psychology as the subject, versus psychology and children, and receive results for both together. Results will be much more consistent as every resource that will populate will have those exact terms in the subject.
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- So how do you develop a controlled vocabulary? As you search databases with keywords, the subject line that will display beneath the result will list vocabulary. Also, if you choose to use Zotero to assist you with citations and bibliographies, as you add sources, Zotero will assemble a controlled vocabulary for you.
Now that you know some of the tools to aid you in your research, how do you evaluate the sources that you do find?
Cite This For Me, The CRAAP Test: An Easy & Fun Way to Evaluate Research Sources​
