COMM 48000: Senior Seminar

Finding the right words to use when searching is the hardest and most time consuming aspect of library research. 

Tips:

• Use Keywords, not Sentences: Spend a few minutes (time yourself!) thinking about your topic and the key terms within your research question. Pick out the most important words.
  Example Question: What effect does social media have on startup companies and entrepreneurs?
  Example Keywords: "social media" and "startup companies" and entrepreneurs
• Use Synonyms: If your initial search doesn't yield results, try to think of other words that mean the same thing.
  Example: "communication strategies and disasters" or "communication strategies and crisis"
  Example: footwear or shoes
• Subject Suggestions: If you find a couple of good articles or books, look at their subject headings. Use them as keywords to see what other resources you can find.
  • The "Subject: Thesaurus" in article databases can show you what subjects appear most often in your searches to help you think of additional keywords.
  • In the library's catalog (books), these are in the "Suggested Terms" tab.
    
• Use Booleans: Try using the "or" search to search for multiple keywords or subjects at once.
  Example: "disasters" or "crisis" will find any articles with either of those keywords in their title, abstract, or subjects. See "Precision in Searching" below for more details about using Boolean search operators (and, or, not).
• Still stuck? Ask a librarian for help! We've spent many years trying to hone our search skills, and we love a challenge!

Subject headings describe the content of each item in a database. Use these headings to find relevant items on the same topic.  Searching by subject headings (a.k.a. descriptors) is the most precise way to search article databases or the library's catalog for books.

It is not easy to guess which subject headings are used in a given database. For example, the phone book's Yellow Pages use subject headings. If you look for "Movie Theatres" you will find nothing, as they are listed under the subject heading "Theatres - Movies."

Keyword searching is how you typically search web search engines.  Think of important words or phrases and type them in to get results.

Here are some key points about each type of search:

When you search a database and do not get the results you expect, Ask Us for advice.

The words "AND," "OR," and "NOT" can help you make a search more precise. This is called Boolean searching, and it can seem really intimidating, but once you get the hang of them, Boolean searches can really help you!

For example, the search 'films AND psychology NOT children', will return a search with results that contain the keywords 'films' and 'pyschology' but not 'children' - important if you are only looking at adolescent psychology in films.

Learn more with this guide from the MIT libraries. It really helps explain Boolean searching, and you don’t have to be a computer scientist to understand!