HDFS 371: Research Methods in HHD

Boolean operators are words--AND, OR, NOT--that you use to link your search terms together when searching for resources. It is good practice to always CAPITALIZE AND, OR and NOT as many search systems specifically require the capitals.

Searching for a Phrase

When searching databases, put quotation marks around phrases to search for those exact words together. 

For example, search: "climate change"

This tells the database to find only results with the full phrase "climate change", not separate occurrences of "climate" and "change"

Truncation 

Truncation is a technique used to broaden your search. Truncation searches multiple forms of a root word to include various word endings and spellings.

• Using an asterisk * at the end of a word will search all endings of that word
• Use when there are multiple possible search terms, starting with the same root
• The database or library catalog will return results that include any ending of that root word.
• Examples:
  • cell*= cells, cellular, cellophane, cellulite
  • child* = child, childs, children, childrens, childhood
  • hospital* = hospital, hospitals, hospitalization, hospitality, etc.
• Truncating some words can return irrelevant results. Looking for a good website on cats? By searching cat* your search will return results, including cats, catapult, cathedral, caterer, and so on. In this instance, search (cat OR cats).
• Truncation symbols vary by database and website, but are most commonly: *,!,?

Wildcards 

A wildcard is a character that can be used in a search term to represent one or more other characters. Substitute a symbol for one letter of a word.

• This is useful if a word is spelled in different ways, but still has the same meaning.
• Examples:
  • wom!n = woman, women
  • colo?r = color, colour

Find Like Terms with Subject Terms:  

• Scroll down on the full record for the book you've found to the subject term fields.
• You can click on these subject terms to find more on-topic items.
• In Academic Search Complete and other databases, you can generally click on the subject term from the item’s full record to pull up a list of all of the items in the database that have been labeled with that subject term.

1. ​​​​​​Starting from the library homepage,  lib.montana.edu,
2. Click Find
3. Click Articles & Research Databases
4. Click the Subjects drop down menu to filter by subject. 
5. Choose your subject. A list of suggested databases will appear. 
6. Select a database to start searching in, then enter keywords – if there are multiple search boxes, enter one keyword per box. 

Video: Finding Databases by Subject:

The video shows the same steps outlined above. This is in place of a transcript, because there are no spoken words in the video.

1. Choose a database
2. Enter keywords to search. Example: Dogs AND (Depression OR anxiety)
3. Filter by peer-reviewed articles, by subject, date, etc. 
4. Download the PDF of articles with full text access
5. OR, Click Check MSU availability to check if we have access elsewhere
   1. If we do have access, download the PDF 
   2. OR, Click Interlibrary Loan and the library will try to get a free copy from another library