A short course on searching bibliographic databases and the web (Creighton University Health Sciences Library)

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Searching Databases

A self-paced tutorial for effective searching with WebSPIRS.

Click on the topic that addresses your particular need.

Proceed systematically through the topics for a short course on searching.

Outline:

I.	Databases
	A.	Structure and Organization
	B.	A very brief history of bibliographic databases
	C.	The mechanics of searching

II.	The problem of language:
	A.	Introduction
		1.	A rose by any other name You must understand these fundamental vocabulary problems!
	B.	Specific Issues
		1.	Word endings
		2.	Synonyms
		3.	Acronyms, initialisms & abbreviations
		4.	Phrasing
		5.	Fuzzy concepts
		6.	Antonyms
		7.	Group concepts / Hierarchical terms
		8.	Word location (fields)
	C.	Planning a search
	D.	Measuring search effectiveness: precision and recall

III.	Boolean Operators
	A.	AND
	B.	OR
	C.	NOT
	D.	Mixed Boolean Operations

IV.	Subject Indexing / Controlled Vocabularies (A solution to the problems of language)
	A.	Standardization of vocabulary
		1.	One subject, one descriptor
	B.	Defining relationships among subjects
		2.	Broader, narrower, and related terms.
	C.	Using the explode function to search for groups of related terms
	D.	The Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)

V.	Truncation and Wildcard
	A.	Asterisk * (truncation)
	B.	Question Mark ? (wild card)

VI.	Proximity Operators
	A.	Near
	B.	Other proximity operators

VII.	Taking advantage of record structure:
	A.	Introduction
	B.	The IN operator

VIII.	Measuring search effectiveness
	A.	Recall
	B.	Precision

IX.	Search strategies and heuristics
	A.	Introduction
	B.	Building Blocks
	C.	Citation pearl growing
	D.	Successive Fractions
	E.	Modifying Precision and Recall (What to do if your search received too many or too few citations)

X.	Miscellaneous Topics
	A.	Words, Phrases and Parsing (Understanding what constitutes a word and how to search for text with embedded punctuation including hyphenated phrases and chemical names.)
	B.	Cited Reference Searching (Have you ever wanted to know if another author referenced an article or other publication in his paper? This is an effective method of finding groups of related articles.)

Creighton University Health Sciences Library and Learning Resources Center
2500 California Plaza
Omaha, Nebraska 68178
voice: 402-280-5108 fax: 402-280-5134

Author: Richard Jizba, � 2000 Creighton University