Nursing: Additional Search Tips

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!

The following video also outlines the ways to use advanced search techniques in databases.

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 synonyms for your search.
  Example: "corporate citizenship" or "social responsibility of business"
  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" 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: "corporate citizenship" or "social responsibility of business" 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!

You can't read 100,000 or even 1,000 articles. Refine your searches to limit your results to just the articles you need!

If you already have a citation from a bibliography or other source, you have everything you need to find the article if the library owns it!

First identify the title of the journal or the title of the article.

Example:
Scruton, R. (1996). The eclipse of listening. The New Criterion, 15(3), 5–13.
In the example above:

• The New Criterion is the title of the journal.
• The eclipse of listening is the article title.
• Scruton, R. is the author's name.
• You know that the title is a journal article because the volume is typically listed in a journal citation and a book citation usually has a publisher name. 

Then find the article:

• Use the Hiram College "Finding Journals" search to find journals by title. Then use the year, volume, and page number to narrow down your search.
• Use OneSource to search for articles by article title. 
• Verify that the information is correct, and view the article if it is available, or request it via Interlibrary Loan if it is not. 
• Remember to save the link to the article by using a "Permalink."

Need a little more practice identifying the parts of a citation? The Virginia Tech University Libraries Citation Tutorial can help!

Watch this video to review the ways to locate a journal article when you have a citation!