Searching Skills
- Searching Skills
- Focusing on a Topic
- Selecting Search Terms
- Constructing a Search Strategy
- Suggestions to Improve Search Results
Constructing a Search Strategy
The topic is known, and search terms have been considered and listed. Now the search is conducted.
The first decisions concerning the search strategy are to determine which search tool you will use (online catalog, database or the Web), and to choose an access point to begin the search: keyword, subject heading, title or author (for review, please see Searching Tools under the "Searching for Information" module).
Next, appropriate search commands for the information retrieval system selected may be applied. These commands include:
- Boolean logic search operators, including nesting
- phrase searching
- adjacency and proximity searching
- truncation searching
- letter replacement searching
- domain searching