Before searching library resources, double-check your assignment to identify which types of information your instructor would like you to use. Some of your projects will leave this choice up to you, while others will require specific types of information. Types of information may include books/ebooks, journal articles, magazine articles, journal articles, grey literature, and more.
✓ Decide which type of library resource you need. Identify the types of information you are required to use in your assignment. This helps you figure out the library resource that makes sense for your research.
✓ Plan your time. The searching stage of your assignment can often take a long time as you decide what sources you need, where to find them, identify your keywords/synonyms/related terms and do multiple searches. Putting time in at this stage will reward you with relevant results that will make writing your assignment much
✓ Figure out library searching shortcuts. Many library resources include features like the ability to email you articles, cite them, and link you to more articles of the same type. Take advantage of the sophistication built into library resources to save you time and find quality information.
✓ Find credible resources. Library resources are almost always more credible than unfiltered web pages from the public web. Library resources can save you time by quickly passing the CRAAP test. What is the CRAPP test? A test that evaluates the quality of information against 5 important criteria.
OneSearch is NWP's discovery layer.
A discovery layer is a multidisciplinary search tool. Discovery layers are like search engines (think: Google) for library content. Using the NWP Learning Commons discovery layer, you will be able to find:
subscription articles in databases
e-content (ebooks, eaudiobooks, streaming media)
open access content
physical library resources (e.g. books, DVDs, magazines) .
Because they search through subscription database content, discovery layers can only be used by the NWP community (students, faculty, staff). Not all of the Learning Commons' database content can be found through its discovery layer. Regardless, it is a good place to start your research.
NWP's list of databases
Databases are searchable collections of resources on a variety of subjects. Databases are subscription-based, and college libraries pay the subscription fees, so that you, as a student, can access the information.
Libraries buy database subscriptions from vendors, like Ebsco, ProQuest, Gale, to name a few. You can think of vendors like cable company providers: Bells, Rogers, Shaw - and their content packages. Same principle.
The content found in databases can include newspaper articles, journal articles, encyclopedia articles, streaming media, and more. When professors ask you to find scholarly or peer-reviewed academic articles, look for them in databases.
Discovery layers and individual databases have filters (sometimes called “limits”) that help you refine your search so that you retrieve results that are more accurate and relevant to what you are looking for.
The three most commonly used filters are:
You may think that you don’t need to learn how to search a library database because you’ve had good luck searching Google (or another web search engine) to locate information. But searching a library database is not the same as searching for information using Google.
In Google, you can type a question in the same way you might ask it in a conversation, for example What are the health benefits of regular exercise? This is called searching using natural language.
In a library database, however, you should search using keywords, and not natural language; statements or questions. Keywords are usually nouns, e.g. people, places or things. Don’t include words like why, what, where, when, if, the, etc. in your database search.
The Choose a Topic module features helpful information on selecting keywords, and brainstorming synonyms.
Before searching a library database, identify all the keywords in your topic, or research question. For the question above, you could start your search with the keywords health benefits exercise.
Boolean Operators (Operators), including AND, OR, and NOT, are words that make it easy for you to customize the results of your search.
When searching for information in a library database or a search engine, you may want to combine some keywords, or exclude certain words, to ensure that your search results are more focused or relevant to your topic.
TIP: In library databases, you don’t need to capitalize proper nouns (e.g. Twitter, Trudeau or Ontario), but Operators must be typed in all capital letters, e.g. NOT, AND, OR.
Using the AND operator tells the database that all words, or terms, that you have connected with AND must be found in any results returned.
If, for example, you are searching for articles about marketing with Twitter, you could search for: marketing AND Twitter. If either word (marketing or Twitter) is not found in an article, it will not appear in your results.
The Operator NOT will narrow your search results by excluding or removing a specific word or words from the search results.
For example, if you’re researching marketing but are not interested in articles about marketing using Twitter, you could search for: marketing NOT Twitter.
Your results from this search will not include any articles that contain the word Twitter.
For a broader search, to find articles that discuss marketing with Facebook or Twitter, you could use the Operator OR, e.g. marketing AND (Facebook OR Twitter). The results from this search will include articles that talk about marketing and Facebook, or marketing and Twitter, or marketing and Facebook and Twitter.
In the above example, you'll see that brackets are included in the search. When you are using more than one Operator in a search (e.g. AND and OR, or NOT and OR), you will need to group your keywords and operator words using brackets, so that the database knows which action to perform first.
"Boolean Operators" by rikhei is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
When searching for an exact phrase, (i.e. exactly the same words in the same exact order), most library databases support the use of "quotation marks" (" ") around the phrase, which could be two or more words.
Quotation marks instruct the database to return results that include that exact phrase. Searching for an exact phrase can help to reduce the number of irrelevant results.
For example, if you search for articles about body language, your results will include both words, but the body might be on the first page of the article, and language on the last.
Searching for “body language” will only return results that include that exact phrase. Using quotation marks to search for an exact phrase will narrow down your results. Exact phrase searching with quotation marks will also work in Google.
There are, however, a few databases which do not recognize or support exact phrase searching using quotation marks. If you get no results, or too few, remove the quotation marks from your phrase and search again.
A wildcard is a special character that replaces one or more letters in a word. Common wildcard symbol used in different databases include:
the question mark (?)
the pound sign (#)
the dollar sign ($)
the percentage symbol (%)
the exclamation mark (!)
When keyword searching you may want to search for all variations of that word. You may miss relevant and useful results if the term you have searched for does not appear in that exact form in an article or book. Wildcard symbols can help you to find word variations.
If you want or need to use a wildcard in your search, check the help section in the database you’re using to find the wildcard options. Wildcard examples include:
globali?ation (the $ sign could be replacing an ‘s’ or a ‘z’)
colo#r (the # could replace one extra letter, and search results will include color or colour)
To ‘truncate’ a word simply means to shorten it by removing one or more letters to go back to the root word.
Let’s imagine we are searching for articles about house prices in Canada. If we search for those keywords only, house prices Canada, we may miss articles that include the words houses, housing, price, pricing, Canada’s or Canadians. If we truncate each word, we will get more results.
So, to search house prices in Canada, we could truncate all keywords and search for: hous* pric* Canad*.
You do need to be careful using when using truncation. Truncating too many letters from a word can lead to unexpected results. For example, searching for nursing in Canada using the truncated word nurs* will also bring back results about nurseries, and truncating Canada to Can* may retrieve articles with words like cantaloupe, cancer, canned, etc.
Once you've identified your keywords and like-terms, you can connect them using the above operators to create a search string which is what we will put into the search bar of our academic search engine.
e.g.
(("air pollution" OR smog OR toxic OR chemical* OR "air-borne pollutants*") AND
("oil refiner*") AND
("respiratory disease*" OR asthma OR air-quality))
The parentheses that you see used in this search string are called "nesting" and they are used to keep like-terms together and separate from other keywords.
If you use an advanced search (seen below) you do not need the parentheses, instead, separate your terms using the boxes provided.
Attribution
Unless otherwise stated, the material in this guide is from the Learning Portal created by College Libraries Ontario. Content has been adapted for the NWP Learning Commons in June 2021. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY NC SA 4.0 International License.
All icons on these pages are from The Noun Project. See individual icons for creator attribution.