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.

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!

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!