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Searching and modifying your search online

Once you start searching a database, you will often find that there are alternative search words or expressions to describe your topic used by the database. You will probably need to experiment with different search terms.

 

Once you have retrieved some results, it is often useful to view the full record and look at the subject headings assigned to the records. You can then get ideas for other search words to use if you have either found too many or too few records. Modifying the search words could help in two ways:

 

1. Retrieve more records if you started by searching on a term not used by the database: eg: SPORTDiscus uses the subject term Soccer not Football.

2. Retrieve fewer, but more relevant records if the database uses a specific term to describe your subject. eg: SPORTDiscus uses the subject term mass media & sports.

Frequently used searching options

1. Limit to searching within specific indexes. Some databases have dozens of different indexes (eg: Medline has 32!) which you can search. Limiting your search to a particular index enables you to search just one section of a database eg: only authors, or subject headings, or abstracts, words in the article title etc, so it can help to make the search results more relevant. The table below summarizes examples of indexes used, examples of what they can be called and an explanation of what they are used to search for.

Name of index Sometimes called What it searches for
Keyword

All fields

Select a field (ie: searches all fields or sections)

All the words entered anywhere in the record.

If no index is specified eg: AMED, SPORTDiscus, the search will be treated as a keyword search (finds word anywhere in the record).

The 'record' will include all the bibliographic information such as author, title, journal title plus the abstract and subject headings.
Abstract   Words within the abstract or summary of the content of the item.
ISBN or ISSN Standard number index which can mean either ISBN or ISSN

ISBN=international standard book number=unique identifying 10 or 13 digit number for a particular edition of a book. The ISBN has recently increased to 13 digits.

ISSN=international standard serial number=unique identifying 8 digit number for a journal title.
Subject headings Descriptor, Subject term, Keyword (in Emerald) Subject words assigned which have major relevance to the item retrieved.
Source

Journal name index

Publication index

 Title of the publication within which the item is contained, such as a journal. Often used to limit to articles within a particular journal; or it could be the title of a book from which an individual chapter is cited.
Title Document title index

In databases which search for journal articles, the title index will search for the article title: if the database indexes book chapters, then the title could also be the title of a chapter.
.......phrase

eg: source phrase

eg: title phrase

eg: subject phrase

 Search will be performed on your search terms as a phrase rather than on keywords

 

2. Limit to years of publication-restricts search to particular years of publication, usually expressed in full eg: 1995-2000. This limit refers to the year the item was published NOT the years on which you are researching information. Databases covering historical topics will also usually include an index to search for historical periods as well. Remember that the usual default display of results is most recently published first (ie reverse chronological order), so if you are interested in the last three years only, those results will be displayed first anyway.

 

3. Limit to a type of document. For databases which index more than one type of publication eg: books, journals, conference proceedings, you can usually restrict the search by publication type.

 

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