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Lesson
Three:
Whether you are searching for traditional library resources or using electronic resources available over the Internet, the development of a search strategy is essential. Internet tools appear and disappear daily but the strategies and processes of searching for information never change. While Lesson 3 focuses on developing search strategies for the Internet, you will find that these same strategies are transferable to other research projects. Free Resources Available Via the Internet The number and type of resources available through the Internet increases daily. The following types of information are usually free to any Internet user:
Fee-Based Resources Available Via the Internet Although the Internet was created to freely distribute information to academics and government users, it has become increasingly commercialized. Even though there is a multitiude of free information available on the Internet it may not be the type of information you need or your professor requires for your research project. The Internet Public Library estimates that close to 90% of a college library's collection will not be available free on the Internet. There will be many times when you will need to use a library catalog, or databases available in libraries (or from library web pages) to locate historical, retrospective or proprietary information in books, journals, newspapers, government documents, or other types of resources. Library vendors that create and sell access to periodicals and reference materials are turning to the Internet as an efficient way to distribute their information products. Therefore, an increasing array of information resources created for student researchers are available via the Internet only to libraries or organizations who subscribe for a fee. Libraries provide these Internet-based databases to registered students, faculty, or members of the library. Some of these fee-based databases may be available only from computers located within libraries; others may be available remotely to registered students, faculty or other library members from any Internet-capable computer. If you are connecting to a database which provides remote access from a computer outside the library, you will be prompted to enter a username and password or a library card number. (At FCCJ, the some of the databases require your Social Security Number, while others require a username and password.) The College Center for Library Automation (CCLA)provides access to a number of remotely accessible databases. Students registered for this course (LIS 2004) may access the following fee-based databases from any Internet-capable computer by typing in their Social Security Number when prompted for a borrower identification number.
Help screens for all of these databases are available from the individual database main screen. In addition to these databases which are available on a statewide basis, many individual libraries subscribe to additional fee-based databases which provide access to information in many subject areas, including social issues, current events, literature, business and financial information, health information, and government information. The FCCJ Libraries also provide the following databases:
Fee-based electronic resources are built on standardized lists of subject terms or thesauri of keywords. General Internet retrieval tools such as search engines (Lesson 4) and subject directories (Lesson 5) lack this standardization and often don't work as precisely as library catalogs or databases found in libraries. It is not as easy to find relevant information on the free Internet as it is through fee-based resources. However you use the Internet, it is important to take time to make a plan of attack. Devise a search strategy by following the steps outlined in the rest of this lesson. If you just dive in and wander aimlessly in search of information, you will find Internet searching both time consuming and frustrating. Step 1: Selecting A Research Topic Before attempting to search for Internet resources, you should have a clear idea of your topic and the kinds of information you will need. To identify a research topic try:
Probably the most common problem students have when trying to come up with a topic is that they are not specific enough. They may choose a subject rather than a topic to research. The following illustrates three subjects and some possible topics within each subject. Subject: Alternative Medicine Topic: Can hypnosis cure disease? Topic: Should insurance companies reimburse patients who use "unproven" treatments? Topic: Does the interest in alternative medicine suggest that conventional medicine is failing? Subject: Animal Rights Topic: Should animal tissues and organs be transplanted into humans? Topic: Is animal dissection or vivisection still necessary as a teaching tool? Topic: Should animal experimentation for cosmetics be abolished? Subject: Home Schooling Topic: Does home schooling isolate children socially? Topic: Should home schooling parents be required to be certified in the subjects they teach? Topic: Should public schools offer extra-curricular activities for home schooled children? A specific topic may not be obvious when you first start a research project. More often than not, you will need to practice some of the activities in step 2 of the research process where you will purposefully attempt to narrow and refine your initial topic. You may need to begin your research project by using resources such as encyclopedia articles or books to gain a basic understanding of the scope of your topic. Look at the basic concepts or ideas your topic involves and decide whether you need to focus on a specific aspect of the subject. You may need to narrow or broaden the scope of your topic. The Internet Public Library provides a guide on Looking For and Forming a Focus. An excellent place to begin looking for background information on your topic is Britannica.com, the electronic version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica which is freely available on the Internet. There are also a number of specialized encyclopedias available either on the Internet or through your local library, which will provide background material on your topic. As you look over the background material and try to get an overview of your topic, consider the following questions.
As you answer these questions by thoughtfully examining your topic you will be building a body of search terms, concepts, ideas, etc. which will help you engage in productive research further in the process. You may also need to visit your local library or search an online library catalog to find background material for your topic and to get a sense of how much information will be available on the topic.
FCCJ and the public library offer interlibrary loan services which allow you to borrow materials located in remote library catalogs. In addition, any student enrolled in a state institution of higher education in Florida has reciprocal borrowing privileges at all community college libraries and all SUS libraries. As you peruse the online catalogs, consider the following questions.
Step 3: Stating Your Topic as a Working Thesis As you begin to develop a thesis for your research project, it is important to note the difference between a topic and a thesis. A topic is a general area of inquiry and is frequently stated as a question; a thesis is more specific and can be defined as an opinion statement. At this early point in your research you can expect the thesis statement to be a preliminary or working one. As you learn more about your topic you will be able to revise the thesis. The working thesis will help keep you on track as you research your topic. The following illustrates some topics and preliminary thesis statements. Topic: What effect does the use of alcoholic beverages have on college students? Thesis Statement: College students who are binge drinkers are more likely to engage in risk taking behavior than students who are either moderate drinkers or who abstain from drinking alcohol. Topic: Should animal tissues and organs be transplanted into humans? Thesis Statement: The potential medical benefits of xenotransplantation outweigh any ethical concerns the public may have. Topic: What effect does television violence have on children? Thesis Statement: The implementation of V-chip technology to block violent or sexually explicit television content will reduce the incidences of school violence. Step 4: Creating Search Statements: Identifying Keywords The next step is to create one or more search statements or search strings, that you will use to search for appropriate resources. First, identify the main concepts or keywords in your preliminary thesis. Choose your keywords carefully. Do not use spoken, natural language in expressing your search statement. Leave out minor words, such as articles ("a", "an", or "the"), prepositional or verb phrases. Stick to the keywords which express the major concepts of your thesis. For the thesis, "College students who are binge drinkers are more likely to engage in risk taking behavior than students who are either moderate drinkers or who abstain," you might choose alcohol, alcoholic beverages, binge drinking, risk taking behavior and college students as keywords. For the thesis, "The implementation of V-chip technology to block violent or sexually explicit television content will lessen the incidences of school violence," use television, TV, V chip, school violence and children. As you begin your search you should keep track of all your search terms so you can see which were effective and which were not. You may find terms you wish to eliminate from your results list or terms you want to always appear in your results. To identify alternative keywords, use a thesaurus, check the Library of Congress Subject Headings, a reference book available in most libraries, or try browsing several of the web subject directories listed in Lesson 5. Once an initial search has been performed, the results list provided by a search directory may also provide alternate keywords or related topics. Step 5: Refining Search Statements The next step in developing your search statement is to refine your keyword search string. This may help to narrow or direct your search so that you retrieve the most relevant results. Complex search statements may need to be refined by adding words and characters such as Boolean operators, quotation marks to indicate exact phrases, proximity operators, truncation symbols, or field search limitations. Boolean searching is based on a system of symbolic logic developed by George Boole, a 19th century English mathematician. Most computer databases and Internet search engines support Boolean searches. Boolean search techniques may be used to perform accurate searches without producing many irrelevant documents. The power of Boolean searching is based on combinations of keywords with connecting terms called operators. The three basic operators are the terms AND, OR, and NOT. (Many Internet search engines replace Boolean operators with symbols, for example + for AND, - for NOT. Lesson 4 provides links to search engine help files which specify how operators are used for that particular search engine.)
The examples above illustrate general topics expressed with just two keywords. Actual search strings which express complex topic ideas may consist of several keywords and combinations of Boolean operators. The thesis statement "Automobile air bags are not safe for children" might result in the search string: automobiles AND air bags AND children AND safety Most databases and search engines support complex Boolean searches. If you have a complex search using more than one operator, you can nest your search terms. Search terms and operators included in parentheses will be searched for first, then terms and operators outside the parentheses. A search for: (ADHD OR attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) AND college students will search for documents containing either the acronym ADHD or the words attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, then narrow the search results only to those documents which also contain the words college students.
Pay attention to phrases in search strings. If you are looking for information on the capital gains tax, you need to enter that part of your search string as a phrase. Otherwise you may retrieve irrelevant documents which contain all of the keywords, in any order, anywhere in the document. Phrase searching is more precise than using the Boolean AND operator. Most search engines and databases support phrase searches. Internet search engines usually require quotation marks to indicate phrases: "capital gains tax", "physician assisted suicide", "human genome project" and the like. A variation on phrase searching which is supported by many library databases and some Internet search engines is known as proximity searching. Proximity searching allows for more flexibility than either Boolean AND operators or phrase searching. Frequently used proximity operators, include ADJACENT (ADJ), WITH (W), and NEAR (N) though others may be supported by the database or search engine. ADJACENT and WITH usually require that the words appear next to each other in the order stated, while NEAR requires that the search terms appear in close proximity in any order. In some databases numbers can be used in combination with the operator to define how close or far apart the words can be. The theory behind proximity searching is that words in a search are usually more meaningful the closer they appear to each other in the document. The following examples illustrate the use of proximity operators.
Another useful search parameter which may be used with some search engines and databases is truncation. Truncation allows the searcher to insert a truncation symbol, usually an * or ? as a wildcard at the end, or the middle of a word. For example, the search term teen* will locate the terms teen, teens, teenager, teenagers, and teenaged. Try not to use truncation on a very short root word as too many words would be retrieved and the relevance of the search would be affected. Some search engines automatically truncate your search terms to find plural, -ing, or -ed endings. Truncation symbols will vary. Some search engines do not support truncation. (Lesson 4 provides links to search engine help files which specify how truncation may be used for that particular search engine.) Field searching is a technique which allows you to search a particular part of a computer record. For example, in many search engines and electronic databases, you can specify that a specific word in your search string be found in the title of the document. You may also be able to search for an author's last name, a range of dates, full-text documents, or material in a particular language; in web search engines you may be able to search by domain name, URL, or type of file (picture, sound or video). This search technique works efficiently when you need to narrow your search in a very specific way. Some web search engines make field searching available only in the advanced search mode. Step 6: Deciding Which Resources To Search Once you have identified the keywords for your topic and have placed your keywords into search statements which reflect the relationship between the words, you should also consider the types of resources which will be most appropriate for your topic. Often your professor will require that certain types of resources be used. Both the Free Internet Resources and the Fee Based Subscription Resources can be used to access a wide variety of types of information. You may be required to use scholarly or peer reviewed publications in addition to popular resources. Depending on your research project, primary source documents may be essential. The discipline area in which your search topic falls may require that the information be current. And finally, you may need to access information from a variety of different formats, e.g., audiovisual, image, raw data, and the like. Scholarly vs. Popular Resources Professors will often require that students use a certain number of scholarly resources for research projects as scholarly information will present original research findings and provide much more detail and usually a better understanding of a topic than will a popular or general interest publication. In some cases, deciding what is a scholarly publication versus what is a popular publication may be easy, especially when considering print sources; in other cases it may be more difficult to make the distinction. Some of the distinguishing factors which are obvious in a print source (e.g., price, availability, etc.) will not be relevant for an electronic publication. Use the following table as a guide to help differentiate between popular and scholarly publications/Internet sites.
Primary vs. Secondary Resources Depending on the general subject area or discipline of your research, primary sources may be a major focus. Primary sources take different forms depending on the discipline. In literature, a primary source is the novel, short story, poem, etc. Primary sources in history include laws, letters, oral histories, diaries, newspaper articles on events and the like. In science, primary sources include reports of original research. Primary sources tend to stand on their own and be firsthand observations of an event. A secondary source is one which analyzes, critiques, reviews or explains a primary source. They are often written by people who were not present when the event occurred or the person under study was alive. They are often written by scholars who have carefully studied the primary source and drawn their own conclusions from it. One type of source is not, by nature, more or less reliable than the other. Some examples of both primary and secondary sources follow.
Current vs. Historical Resources For some disciplines, timeliness or currency of information is crucial. In the sciences and medicine, it is very important that the most recent information on a topic be retrieved. In history or literature, currency may not be as important. Frequently, professors will place time limitations on assignments and this will help guide your research. Some search engines and fee-based electronic databases will allow you to specify a time frame for a search. As more and more formats of material are becoming available on the Internet, you may find that an audio file, an image, or a video clip may be appropriate for your research topic. For example, if you were required to make an oral presentation of your research project in addition to a written report, and you were going to use software such as Powerpoint, you might find it helpful to import audio files, images and video clips into the presentation. (Lesson 5 provides information on downloading various formats of information from the Internet.)
Step 7: Revising Your Topic and Searching Research is seldom a neat, tidy process. Sometimes your first attempt on the Internet will not give you the results you anticipate. You may either find too much information on your topic, not enough information on your topic, or the type of information you find may not be helpful. In this case, it may be necessary to change or redesign your topic question or statement.
When there are too few sources on your topic, try the following to expand or broaden your topic.
Here is a sample research topic and thesis statement that illustrates how a researcher might work with keywords, Boolean operators, nesting of operators, truncation and field searching to get better results. If your chosen topic area is "The effect of television violence on children", you may find this too broad an area to cover. The thesis statement, "The implementation of V-chip technology to block violent or sexually explicit television content will reduce the incidences of school violence" is more specific. Keywords for this might include:
Some of the possible search statements which could be used for this thesis are:
Complete Exercise Three when you are finished reading the lesson. Exercise Three is worth a total of 7 points. Copyright © 1997-1999 Florida Community
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