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SEARCHING STRATEGY
PTAR Kampus Puncak Alamhttp://library.puncakalam.uitm.edu.my/
© Dikemaskini : Januari 2017
Unit Perkhidmatan AkademikPerpustakaan Tun Abd Razak (PTAR) Cawangan Selangor, Kampus Puncak Alam
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WHY?• To get relevant results• To save time going through irrelevant information• To go beyond Googling: retrieving anything andeverything
HOW?• Enable you to quickly retrieve relevant information
from the thousands of records in a database.• By using the following methods below you can make
your search statement specific and increase thechance of retrieving relevant information.
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Boolean Operators• or = any of the terms may be present• and = all terms must be present• not = excludes specific search term
using “and” operator narrows the search
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AND: is used to narrow your results. Focus thesearch when you have multiple search terms.
OR: is used to broaden the results by using twoor more similar concepts
NOT: narrows the search as you exclude certainconcepts
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Boolean Operators
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Truncation: Truncation will help you find something if you don’t know
how to spell a word. Is a technique that broadens your search to include various
word endings and spellings. To make sure you get all variations of a word, use the
truncation symbol. In most databases, this symbol is an
asterisk *
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Truncation examples• International spellings
o theat* theater, theatre, ALSO theatrical• Various endings
o comput* computer, computing, computationo psycho* psychology, psychopathic,
psychopathology, psychotherapy• Use as many common letters as possible
o colon* colonoscopy, colonization, colon, colonyo coloni* colonization, colonies, colonialism
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psycho* psychology, psychopathic,psychopathology, psychotherapy
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Wildcard• Wildcards substitute a symbol for one letter of a word.• This is useful if a word is spelled in different ways, but still
has the same meaning.• For example: searching for educat* would tell the
database to look for all possible endings to that root.Results will include educate, educated, education,educational or educator.
• A question mark (?) may be used to represent a singlecharacter, anywhere in the word. It's most useful whenthere are variable spellings for a word, and you want tosearch for all variants at once.
• For example, searching for colo?r would return both colorand colour.
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Wildcard Symbols
? = Match exactly one letter
# = Match zero or one letter
* = Match multiple letters
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Wildcard Examples• Match multiple letters• International spellings
o orthop*dic orthopedic, orthopaedic• Related concepts
o psych*y psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy,psychopathy
• Replace entire wordo “A Midsummer * dream” A midsummer night’s dream
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psych*y psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy,psychopathy
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Phrase Searching:• Phrase Searching means searching for two or more words
as an exact phrase.• Phrase searching is achieved by putting quotation marks
around the phrase. The search engine/online database willreturn only hits that have the exact phrase with the wordsin the exact order.
Example:
fever treatment
“fever treatment”
‘fever treatment’
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fever treatment = Search Results 4,799
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“fever treatment” = Search Results 128
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‘fever treatment’ = Search Results 135
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fever treatment = Search Results 286,307
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‘’fever treatment’’ = Search Results 868
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‘fever treatment’ = Search Results 9
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Advanced Searching : Helps you to narrow your searchand access more relevant results.
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Field Search / SearchLimiters
Common fields include: Author, title, journal title, abstract,publisher, date/year of publication, subject/descriptor
• The same applies on search engines, fields: web,images, news, maps etc.
• Search limiters (sometimes called Filters) are powerfulways to focus your search results so that you don’t haveto look through lots of irrelevant items to find what you’relooking for.
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FieldSearch
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Filters / Refine Search
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• Formulate search query using Boolean, Truncation,Wildcards, etc.
• Sort by relevance• Refine search (e.g. narrow down the results)• Mark• Save Results• Download more than 1 PDF at one time
Online Database Search Tips
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