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Search Strategy Assignment

The document discusses how librarians can help students effectively search online databases and find relevant information for their research topics. It explains that Boolean operators like AND, OR, and NOT can be used to refine searches and eliminate inappropriate results. Specifically, AND narrows searches to only results that contain all terms, OR expands searches to results that contain either term, and NOT eliminates unwanted terms from search results. Combining these operators with parentheses allows for even more customized searches. An example is provided of how one may search databases using keywords, synonyms, and Boolean operators to obtain a focused set of results.

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Tara IknerUWA
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196 views2 pages

Search Strategy Assignment

The document discusses how librarians can help students effectively search online databases and find relevant information for their research topics. It explains that Boolean operators like AND, OR, and NOT can be used to refine searches and eliminate inappropriate results. Specifically, AND narrows searches to only results that contain all terms, OR expands searches to results that contain either term, and NOT eliminates unwanted terms from search results. Combining these operators with parentheses allows for even more customized searches. An example is provided of how one may search databases using keywords, synonyms, and Boolean operators to obtain a focused set of results.

Uploaded by

Tara IknerUWA
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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The Web has become the most important reference tool in the digital age.

Students are

able to easily access information, but is it relevant for their specific need? It is our job as

librarians to guide students to resources that best fit their needs, and teach them how to extract

the information that is most important to their research topic. In the following paragraphs, I will

explain what I’ve learned about the search process in databases, and how Boolean operators can

help refine searches.

Online periodical databases contain articles from academic journals, magazines,

newspapers, and many other sources. When accessing databases through UWA online library, if

you know the name of the specific database you are looking for, you can search by the title of the

database through an A-Z listing, or you may search for a database by a particular subject area. In

the database EBSCOHost, Individuals may choose a basic search option or advanced. If

individuals know how to correctly use the advanced search options, they will be able to find

more relevant results for their topic. Using Boolean operators is one search option that allows

users to define relationships between words or groups of words. Using these operators will save

time and effort by eliminating inappropriate hits.

The three basic Boolean operators are three simple words, AND, OR, and NOT. Using

AND narrows your search results, and will retrieve results that contain all of your search terms.

Phrases should be enclosed in quotation marks in order to achieve search results that include

those phrases as one unit. In the EBSCOHost data base, the AND is always implied. This means

if you search library books, the database will automatically search library and books. To avoid

these AND searches, use double quotations around your query.


The OR operator is used to expand search results. Using OR will yield results with either

one of your search terms. OR can also be helpful when you want to search for various forms of a

word, or synonyms for words.

The NOT operator also narrows search results. Using NOT can help eliminate terms or

concepts that are not important to you search. Individuals should use caution when using NOT so

that they don’t hinder there search and overlook some relevant sources.

Sometimes it may be helpful to combine more than one Boolean operator using

parentheses, to yield more specific results. By using this method of nesting operators and search

terms within other terms will help customize your results to more accurately reflect your topic.

Before starting my database search on the required assignment, I went through and

underlined important words and phrases that would be helpful in my search. I did several

searches using keywords from the thesis statement, but I found that replacing some of the words

with synonyms helped. I used the Boolean operator ‘And’ to connect the search terms librarians,

school leadership, and, academic achievement. My initial search results yielded 21 hits. I

narrowed my search using by dates, using only articles from 2010 to 2019, which reduced my

search to 9 hits. I narrowed again using only peer-reviewed journals, which gave me 6 articles

that I felt were relative to my search.

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