This Stebbins article discussed how to use Boolean operators and other techniques in order to get good results when searching databases. To begin it broke down Boolean operators into three major steps. The first was to break down the search into major concepts. The second was to create synonyms for each of the major concepts. The third and final step is to combine the synonyms inside of parentheses with “or”, and to combine the different concepts with “and” in between the parentheses. Some of the tips that were given to get better search results included the following: using truncation to find alternate word endings, use a subject search instead of a keyword search to narrow down the results, and to limit the type of resource that you are searching for.
I felt that this article was very relevant to the class since at the time we were discussing how to use databases to search for information. For me, this article was a review of what we have spent a lot of time in class discussing and practicing. Before this class I was not very familiar with any of these techniques. All of these techniques are very helpful when it comes to searching for information with in a database. I feel sure that these tools will come in handy with any type of research that I may be doing in the future.
