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Section Five Contents:
Search Strategies
Ulrich's
Review Questions
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Search Strategies
- Your search strategy will vary depending on which database you are using. It is useful to remember that all databases supplied by one vendor, OVID for example, will look and act similarly. Therefore, once you learn the search strategies for a certain vendor’s database, you can extend this knowledge to other databases produced by the same vendor.
- LISA is a Silver Platter database. Since this is the database you will be using most often throughout this project, we will focus on search strategies for LISA.
- The truncation symbol in LISA is the asterisk. Therefore, to search fields containing the words library or libraries or librarians, use the search term "librar*".
- The truncation symbol (or wildcard symbol) in Library Lit is a $ sign.
- When searching the telnet version of the catalog (DRA), the truncation symbol is a question mark.
- Unfortunately, LISA does not allow limiting searches to research articles, which would be extremely useful for this assignment. However, there are strategies you can use to circumvent this problem. Research articles' abstracts include terms that most non-research articles' abstracts do not. Some examples of these terms are methodology, hypothesis, research, experiment, etc. You can search the field "Words Anywhere" for these terms while simultaneously searching for the keywords of your topic (using Boolean search techniques).
- If you retrieve too many or too few hits, narrow or expand your search by adding or dropping search terms.
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