eSearch workshopTHERESE ROBIN, HEAD OF LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SERVICES

SARAH BERTIE, ONLINE SERVICES LIBRARIAN

APRIL 2015

Search Experience How do you search?

How did you learn?

Search strategies?

Frustrations?

eSearch Research “Studies consistently find that queries composed by university… library patrons are simple and flawed; with few search terms, little use and frequent misapplication of Boolean operators, numerous errors, and significant evidence of misunderstandings of the system in use.”

Goodman, J., Gary, M., & Wood, R. (2013). Bibliographic Search Training for Evidence-Based Management Education: A Review of Relevant Literatures. Academy of Management Learning & Education, Special Issue - Evidence-Based

Management.

What this workshop is about IT IS NOT an overview of how to locate the best resources for your particular assignment or subject – that was covered in Academic skills carnival. If you missed it see ormond.unimelb.edu.au under Learning>>Academic Skills>>Research.

• FindingInfo2015

• DatabasesTipsTricks2015

IT IS very specifically about electronic bibliographic search

i.e. how to structure individual database searches to

• Minimise frustration

• Retrieve a manageable number of relevant results

It is based on research that identifies the elements of a successful search and most effective sequencing of these elements.

Depth Breadth

Sequencing

Depth the range of terms used to describe a specific concept. The more synonyms that can be linked together for a particular concept, the greater the depth of coverage for that concept.

E.g. (teenager OR youth OR adolescent)

Breadth the number of different concepts captured in a search statement. The more concepts effectively linked in a search, the greater the coverage of the domain that includes all concepts in a search task.

E.g. Dogs AND cats

(dogs OR puppies OR canine) AND (cats OR kittens OR feline)

Sequencing the order in which the steps in the electronic search are conducted. An established effective search strategy is to

1. search individual concepts in depth

2. link them together to provide breadth of coverage for the whole search task.

e.g. sentencing AND (teenager OR youth OR adolescent)

This is much more effective than searches that jump from option to option and investigate concepts in varying depth.

Searching Behaviours Two primary, complementary approaches to electronic bibliographic search: (1) The snowball method

◦ Start with an article (recommended or found by a general search) then search ◦ backward for references cited in that article and◦ forward for newer publications that cite the focal article

◦ Search on specific subjects assigned to the article (2) The building blocks method

◦ Interrogating databases using a combination of key words, connectors, and search delimiters to identify relevant records on a topic of interest.

It requires quite a bit of skill and, when used properly, it yields the most comprehensive set of relevant records. We are focusing on the Building Blocks method today

Search practices that lead to frustration

Using too few search terms

Forgetting to use Boolean operators or misunderstanding how they work

Making spelling errors or typos

Treating all databases as if their Search functions are the same.

Giving up too soon – trying one search and jumping to a completely different

search without trying to refine your first search

A better way Pre-Search

Concepts: Identify all major concepts

Synonyms: Identify multiple subject terms/synonyms relevant to each concept

Search

Combine: search terms and concepts by

Using appropriate Boolean operators AND; OR; NOT

Using wildcard characters and quotation marks and parenthetical groupings to expand or focus results respectively.

The 8 step eSearch process

1. Select a concept from the research question

2. Identify several correct terms to describe the concept, using self-selected key words, the index, or the thesaurus

3. Link these synonyms with OR

4. Repeat Steps 1 to 3 for additional concepts until all concepts from the research question are defined. (Skilled searchers review retrieved records for relevant key words and use those terms and synonyms to refine their queries.)

5. Link groups of terms for each concept with AND to find the common records

6. Evaluate the suitability of the records obtained

7. Rework any inappropriate concept terms by repeating Steps 2 and 3

8. Repeat Steps 5 and 6 and continue until most of the records retrieved are related to the assigned topic.

And then… Recognize how to limit results to academic/peer-reviewed journals and by date range.

Save and export search query histories and result numbers

Boolean operatorsPurpose Example Result

AND combine keywords that reflect different concepts

humour AND therapy negligent AND conduct

Search results will contain both of the terms Using AND decreases the number of results, because each time a keyword is added, the focus of the search is narrowed.

OR combine keywords that reflect similar concepts

humour OR laughter OR comedy

Search results will contain one, or both, of the terms Using OR increases the number of results, because a broader range of keywords is searched

NOT exclude a keyword humour AND therapy NOT children

Search results will contain both of the terms humour and therapy but only if they do not contain the third term children. Using NOT reduces the number of results by excluding information not required.

Search Strategy

DEPTH Keywords

Synonyms1. Look at the terms used in your

recommended reading, lecture notes and textbooks.

2. Brainstorm, thesaurus, glossary –general articles.

3. 2nd round – harvest keywords for results

Keywords Refine

Truncation (e.g., child* = child, children, childhood)

Wildcard (“The quick * fox”)(Google)

Wildcard “The quick ? fox” (Proquest)(sm?th) Finds: smith and smyth

BREADTH Connectors (teenager OR youth OR adolescent)

SEQUENCE Combine searches sentencing AND (teenager OR youth OR adolescent)

Example “What effects does job satisfaction have on creativity and innovation?”

Which database?

Subject Research Guides (LibGuides)

ABI/INFORM GlobalTM (Part of ProQuest ABI/INFORM Complete)

FIRST ATTEMPT

Starting with the 4 concepts (ignoring 1st impulse to make a phrase out of job satisfaction)

Job satisfaction creativity innovation

Typically people type in a string of keywords from the assignment research question

In the Basic Search box - or in the first line of Advanced Search

Job satisfaction creativity innovation

This is the same as an AND search – all the words have to be there but not necessarily close together and anywhere in full text of articles or in indexed fields like Author, Title, Subject = 13775 Results

The same search in Google gave 29,600,000 results

Keywords only

Next: search in the indexed fields only (author, title,

subject ) i.e. not the full text, click on Modify search to

use the down arrow to select the option Anywhere except

full text ALL. The search strategy is automatically changed

to all(job satisfaction creativity innovation) = 39 results

When you search Google you are searching their index so can’t opt out of full-text search

Search indexed fields only (not full-text)

Apply filters to narrow search results: Looking at the panel on the right of the results screen - you can see that 16 were published in scholarly journals. The remaining records were theses, working papers, conference papers or proceedings, articles in magazines, trade journals.

At this point you could filter by Full text (leaves 23 results) and peer reviewed (bringing you down to 7 records) For practical purpose for your assignment – I suggest full text. If you were doing a comprehensive literature review I would suggest considering all 39.

Also it can be good to reduce by date published e.g. from 2005 gives 15 results

If you narrow to peer reviewed you get 3

Too few is as bad as too many

Build 4 separate search statements (one for each concept in the research question) by inserting the OR operator between synonyms.

(Search for records on each concept separately and evaluate the records enabled them to refine the synonyms for each concept)

(job OR employment OR work OR employee OR worker)

(satisfaction OR morale OR enjoyment)

(creativity OR imagination OR creative)

(innovat*).

Link the four separate search statements together using the AND operator. Resulting seach statment:

(job OR employment OR work OR employee OR worker) AND (satisfaction OR morale OR enjoyment) AND (creativity OR imagination OR creative) AND (innovat*).

For the last concept, innovation, use the * truncation symbol to search for any ending of the root word “innovat" (e.g., innovate, innovation, innovations, innovative, innovativeness).

This gives 211 results and they seem more relevant

Filter by Peer reviewed and you get 55 and by Full text and you get 30

A more manageable number and more relevant results

Using the strategy

A more manageable number and more relevant results

Replicating this search in Google Scholar results in a huge number of results. Attempts to narrow the search are less successful. Such a large number of records is retrieved because:

(a) Google Scholar searches for the key words in the full text of every article

(b) Google Scholar indexes scholarly publications across the entire World Wide Web from all fields of research, languages, countries, and time periods. It also includes working papers, conference papers, and open access journals from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations.

Typically searchers cope with this by just looking at the first page or 2 – relying on Google relevance ranking. 58% of people don’t look beyond page 1.

While searching Full Text seems like “a good thing” it can result in an unwieldy mass of results. The ability of Database searching to not search Full text i.e. to search indexed terms only is an important advantage

Same strategy – Different results

Google Scholar: 17,900 results

Further HelpThérèse Robin, Head of Library and Information ServicesExt 1117

Sarah Bertie, Online Services LibrarianExt 1116

Hala Zabakly, Technical Service LibrarianExt 1145

library@ormond.unimelb.edu.au

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