This document discusses techniques for conducting effective internet searches, including the use of truncation and wildcard symbols to broaden searches and find variants of words. It also covers the use of Boolean search operators like AND, OR and NOT to combine or exclude terms. Phrase searching and proximity searching are described as ways to make searches more specific by finding terms that appear near each other or in a specified order.

1. Internet Search Techniques
Hup university
28-02-2018
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2. Truncation and wild card symbols
• widen your search and ensure that you don't
miss relevant records
• Most databases are not intelligent - they just
search for exactly what you type in.
• Truncation and wild card symbols enable you
to overcome this limitation.
• These symbols can be substituted for letters to
retrieve variant spellings and word endings.
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3. • a wild card symbol replaces a single letter -
useful to retrieve alternative spellings and simple
plurals
example wom?n will find woman or women
• a truncation symbol retrieves any number of
letters - useful to find different word endings
based on the root of a word
eg africa* will find africa, african, africans,
africaans
eg agricultur* will find agriculture, agricultural,
agriculturalist
Truncation and wild card symbols
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4. Search Operators – AND
• combine your search words and include
synonyms
• Boolean operators, search operators allow you to
include multiple words and concepts in your
searches.
• AND retrieves records containing both words.
• contains records with both women and africa in
the text.+ It narrows your search.+ Some
databases automatically connect keywords
with and.
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5. • OR retrieves records containing either word.
• contains records with women, or gender, or
both words in the text.+ It broadens your
search.+ You can use this to include synonyms
in your search.
Search Operators – OR
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6. • NOT retrieves your first word but excludes the
second.
• indicates that only records containing just
Africa will be retrieved (not those with both
Africa and Asia)
• Beware! By using this operator you might
exclude relevant results because you will lose
those records which include both words.
Search Operators – NOT
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7. Phrase Searching
• Phrase searching is a useful technique which can increase the
relevance of your results. Sometimes your search may comprise
common words which, when combined in an AND search, retrieve
too many irrelevant records.
• Databases use different techniques to specify phrase searching -
check the online help. Some web search engines and databases
allow you to specify a phrase using inverted commas.
eg "agricultural development"
eg "foot and mouth"
• Hint! Some databases automatically perform a phrase search if you
do not use any search operators eg agriculture africa is not a phrase
used in English so you may not find any items on the subject.
Use AND in between your search words to avoid this.
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8. Proximity Searching
• make a search more specific and exclude irrelevant
records
• Some databases use 'proximity operators'. These enable
you to specify how near one word must be to another and,
in some cases, in what order. This makes a search more
specific and excludes irrelevant records. Performing a
proximity search will only retrieve the two words in the
same sentence, and so exclude those irrelevant records.
• Databases which have this facility vary considerably in their
methods
eg: Web of Science - women same africa - retrieves records
where the two words appear in the same sentence.
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