Infoskills Module C Flashcards
What language does Library databases not understand very well?
Natural language (e.g., s playing violent video games bad for teenagers or not)
What two things ar important to get the best possible database search results?
- use well chosen terms 2. Use search techniques the database ‘understands’
What is step 1 for a qualitive search term?
Identify main concepts in your topic, for example, violent video games, aggression and teenagers
What is step 2 for a qualitive search term?
Identify search terms for each concept, make a table with all search terms you can find for your concepts. By searching with different search terms that mean the same thing for each concept, you make sure to not miss out on relevant sources.
What are the three Boolean operators?
AND, OR and NOT
What does the Boolean operator ‘AND’ stand for/ do?
Narrows results, combines search terms so that each research result contains all of the terms. (Intersection)
What does the Boolean operator ‘OR’ stand for/ do?
Broadens your results, combines search terms so that each result contains at least one of them. (Union)
What does the Boolean operator ‘NOT’ stand for/ do?
Narrows results, excludes all terms that follow the operator from search results. (p(a) - intersection with p(b) for instance.
Write an example of the following: Usually, the AND has precedence over OR. With nesting you can override this default search order. By using parentheses ( ) you can specify the order in which a search should be processed. Terms within parentheses will be found first and then combined with the search terms outside the parentheses.
(youth OR teens OR adolescents) AND gaming. -> Now it would find records that contain at least one of the terms in the parentheses and then find items also containing gaming.
What are title, author, publishing year etc. used for?
Field researching. This is helpful when:
- you’re looking for documents written by a specific author;
- you know the title of the document you want;
- you want documents on a particular subject;
- you want documents that specifically mention your search term(s) in their abstract.
With what marks can you prevent a database to think, when using two words, automatically that there is an AND in between?
“quotation marks”
What is the meaning of truncation?
Example: Invest* -> invest, investor, invested, investing, investment etc.
Truncation: search technique that allows you to considerably broaden your search by including various word endings in your search. You cut off the ending of the word and replace it by * (truncation symbol)
What is meant by a Wildcard?
Labo?r -> labour , or, Leader? -> Leader, leaders but not leadership. It replaces zero to on e letter inside the word or at the end of the word. Useful for retrieving alternate spellings and plurals. us the ? symbol for this.
What are examples of limits you can apply on a search?
Scholarly texts, publication type, language , document type, date etc.
What does filters (refining filters) do?
They let you filter the outcomes of your search result by a variety of factors.
