Eng1102 - Gatesman -2012: Galileo

I throw my hands up in the air sometimes, saying ay-oh Galileo

Keyword Searches

• Searches various fields in bibliographic records (Title, Author, Subject, Abstract, etc)
• Allows use of natural language in searches
• Often retrieves a large number of irrelevant results
• Useful as a starting point in a database

Subject Searches 

• Searches only the Subject field
• Uses a specific vocabulary of subject terms, making it more precise but harder to use
• Will only retrieve results relevant to the subject searched
• Excellent for helping to narrow down keyword searches that retrieve too many results 

AND- Finds only results that contain both search terms....kind of obvious. 

OR- Finds results that contain either search term.  

NOT- Finds results which contain the first search term, but specifically excludes those that contain the second, even if they do contain the first.

TRUNCATION- Used to search for every form of a root word, symbols vary by database ! and * are the most common (eg evol* to search for evolve, evolution, evolutionary, etc).   

Wildcards- Uses a character to represent either any possible character or characters or sometimes even allowing for multiple words (check help files for which symbol to use). Wildcard searching is not often used.