LIS 4011 - Class 6 Notes
1. Avoid searching by adjectives or prepositional phrases
| BAD | BETTER |
| statistics for airports in the US | statistics AND airports AND united states |
| helping obese people loose weight | obesity AND weight loss |
| How many people live in China? | china AND population; china AND census |
| information about trebuchet engineering | |
| history of sewing of wedding dresses | |
| number of US Supreme Court Justices over time |
2. Don't limit the size of the result set just because it is large.
Search Stategies to Emulate
1. Do synonym brainstorming. Don't just brainstorm on the topic, but also on types of resources that could be used to address the topic.
2. Is there a controlled vocabulary available that can be leveraged?
3. Try for specific results first. If more results needed, draw bigger concentric circles around the center.
The Art of Full-Text Searching
1. Consider using proximity operators instead of Boolean operators.
2. There will likely be no controlled vocabulary. You need to think in terms of likely phraseology, style of the periodical (trade publication, scholarly publication, journalistic style, etc.), and synonymous use of terms.
3. You will need good strategies for limiting your result sets. Good strategies might include a specific date range, searching only the headline, title, or lead paragraph, or doing very tight proximity searching.
LexisNexis Academic Search Workshop
Looking for articles on where the Titanic is located and recovery or preservation efforts.
Newspaper articles about the initial planning of Denver's Sixteenth Street Mall.
Features of Databases
There are many more examples of each of the databases than I give below. These are just some examples.