Mastering Advanced Research Techniques for Academic Excellence

SuperSearching! Advanced Research Techniques

EBSCO EBSCO gives us access to a lot of great academic databases. I really like Academic Search Premier. Log in using your AP credentials, or go to onlinelibrary.uen.org, select EBSCO High Schools, and choose Academic Search Premier. From there, select Advanced Search. Don t forget to click on Scholarly Journals if your assignment calls for them.

In a word document or on a piece of paper, write out all of your key words from your research question. What are the most important words from the question that you will need to research in order to find a good answer? For instance, let s say my research question was How might education in a correctional facility play a role in reducing recidivism? I would write down the following words: Step One: Synonyms education correctional facility recidivism Correctional facility is a phrase. I want to search those two words together (I don t care about other types of facilities), so I put quotation marks around them. Gun control, stem cells, and global warming are other examples of phrases. Make sure to put quotation marks around your phrases to make effective use of your searching.

Synonyms Here s another example: How has the Internet influenced students learning styles? Internet Students Learning styles (as a phrase because I don t care about other styles) Now you try. Write down the key words from your topic. Then, next to these key words, write down synonyms (words having the same or similar meanings) and other closely related words. Internet, web, online, www, World Wide Web Students, learners, pupils, scholars learning styles, auditory, visual, tactile, kinetic (I listed some learning styles because some researchers may only focus on one or two styles)

Synonyms Going back to our How might education in correctional facilities play a role in reducing recidivism? question, our synonyms would look like this: Education, schooling, instruction, learning, tutoring correctional facilities, jail, prison, penitentiary, incarceration Recidivisim, reoffending, reoffense, repeat offense Now you try. For each of your words and phrases, go through and make a list of synonyms or closely related terms. If you re drawing a blank, try thesaurus.com or synonyms.com. Try to keep phrases to two or three words. The longer the phrase, the less likely you ll find anything.

Truncation Truncate means to shorten, so with truncation, we re cutting words short but in a way that still maximizes our search results. We do this by placing an asterisk (*) after the letters our search must contain. This allows us to search for multiple endings of words. There are lots of words that start with educat*: education, educator, educators, educating. If we type in educat*, we ll get results for all of those words. It s like we re searching for four things at once. Environment* helps us find environment, environments, environmental, environmentalist, environmentalists, and environmentalism. Be careful where you put the *. If you want to find info on women or woman and you truncate to wom*, you might get information about wombats. If you try education* you might miss out on words like educated or educator. Over or under truncating can be bad for search results. This only works for the endings of words. If you want to change letters within words, you can use a wildcard. If you want to search for different letters within a word, use a question mark (?). For instance, to search for both woman and women, type in wom?n. If you want to search an alternate spelling plus up to one extra letter, use a number symbol (#). For instance, to search for color and colour (British spelling), search col#r.

Truncation Now look over your list to see if we can use truncation on any of the terms and phrases. Use my example as a guide: Educat*, school*, instruct*, learn*, tutor* correctional facilit*, jail, prison*, penitentiar*, incarcerat* Recidiv*, reoffen*, repeat offen*

Boolean Operators: AND and OR Now it s time to search. Go into the Advanced Search. We re going to place each synonym group in (parentheses), adding the word OR (UPPER CASE) between each of the synonyms to make sure our results contain at least one of the words. Between each group, we re going to add the word AND to make sure that all synonym groups are represented in our search. If we need to add more ANDS, just press the + symbol next to the search box. If you don t get any results, consider taking out a keyword or verbs (if you used a word like changed or influenced ).

Searching with Fields Doing an abstract search can help narrow down results. If the terms are strong enough to be in the abstract, they are going to show up frequently in the text of the article. Subject Terms searches can also help narrow down results.

Sources Adamson, Shaun R, et al. Using Information Effectively. Information Navigator: LIBS 1704. Weber State University Stewart Library, 2018. Top 5 Searching Strategies. EBSCO, https://www.ebsco.com/sites/g/files/nabnos191/files/acquiadam- assets/Top-Five-Searching-Strategies-Handout.pdf?language=en_US. Accessed 12 Mar. 2019.