Searching Databases

The secret to getting good results when searching databases depends on how you search.

Choose words to describe your key concepts

The first step is turning your topic into a series of key terms or concepts that you can use in a database. For example, you have been asked to answer the following question:

What are the current costs of dryland salinity to Australian agricultural landholders?

In this example there are four separate concepts: costs, dryland salinity, Australian and agricultural landholders

Searchable concepts are usually concrete words or phrases. It is really difficult to search concepts such as impact, effect, outcomes, efficacy, access to, etc. because they are not specific. These terms are "fuzzy concepts" and we recommend that you only search for them if your initial search produces very large sets.

Never use prepositions (for, on, in, towards), nor definite or indefinite articles (an, a, the) as keywords (search terms) - they are very common.

Synonyms

Think of all possible ways of describing the concepts you wish to search and write down all the relevant words and their synonyms. Think about broader and narrower terms and variations in spelling (eg U.S. spelling). When searching for plants or animals remember to search for both the common name and the scientific name (eg wheat OR triticum).

costs	dryland salinity	australian	agricultural landholders
cost	salinity	australia	landholder/s
expense/s	saline soil/s	australasian	farmer/s
expenditure/s		new south wales	grazier/s
overhead/s		victoria
		queensland
		western australia

Word Endings

Some of your words may have variations of spelling/different endings/plural forms. For example:

Australia / Australian / Australians

Databases have a useful feature for searching for differences in word endings called "truncation". You can use a truncation symbol to signify "search for different endings".

Each database is different - the truncation symbol could be a * ? $ or ! For example, in the library catalogue you can use farm* to find farms/farming/farmer/farmers/farmed

It is not useful to truncate very short or common word stems such as cow* because you will retrieve a large number of irrelevant results (including coward, cowboy, cower, coworker - not what you want!)

Boolean Searching

Databases use the words AND and OR to connect concepts together. AND and OR are known as Boolean operators.

Use AND to connect key concepts together

If you searched for australia AND rice you would get results that mention both australia and rice

Use OR to connect synonyms (words with similar meanings) together

If you searched for rice or oryza sativa you would get results that contained the word 'rice' plus all the records that contained the word 'oryza sativa' (and some might have both).

Putting it all Together

Write down all the words to describe each concept in your topic, include all plurals and synonyms.

Connect words across columns with an AND

Connect words across rows with an OR

If you are combining ANDs and ORs together, put brackets () around the OR statements

Eg (wheat or triticum) and austral* (* - truncation symbol for Web of knowledge databases, eg CAB Abstracts)

Write down the search that you would use, using ANDs and ORs and truncation symbols

For example (peach tree or prunus persica) and (pruning or pruned or prune)