UCS 20201 Course Guide

Strategies for Searching

Using library resources to find information can feel tough at first, but there are lots of features built-in to actually make your life easier!

• Use Keywords, Not Sentences: Look at your research question and pull out the most important words and search just those.
• Try Synonyms: If you don't find what you need, try to think of other ways to say the same thing. Example: adolescent and teenager
• Find Subject Headings: When you find an article that looks promising, click the subject headings (in blue) to find similar articles. Think of these like a librarian's hashtag; if you can figure out what the experts are calling your topic, you'll find more.
•  Use Boolean Operators: AND - Narrows your search by combining terms, OR - Broadens your search by including any of the terms, NOT - Excludes terms to narrow your results
• Still stuck? Ask a librarian for help! We are experts at finding information and love a challenge!

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!

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.