Search strings aid with returning relevant results within the databases and even search engines (did you know Google has and advanced search?). When you have great keywords, synonyms and phrases (hereby known as terms) for your search topic, you can combine terms to help the database locate materials relevant to your topic.
Steps to construct a String:
Locating Keywords to use as search terms come from your topic question:
Query: How does climate change effect polar bear habitats and hunting patterns?
Let's pull critical words and phrases from the question to create a list of search terms for the database.
Now let's develop synonyms to further lengthen our search term list
This is a great list!
Combining the keywords and phrases we have brainstormed now need connectors or Boolean Operators to help refine our search.
Search engines like Google will search all of your search terms.
polar bears climate change food source
The search engine may use implied Boolean Operators to combine your terms but will ultimately return results which have the better SEO, which may not necessarily produce results we are looking for.
Databases use what is called controlled vocabulary.
Controlled Vocabulary: a specific set of terms used to tag and index articles and materials within the database.
polar bears climate change food source
In my search in Academic Serach Complete, I had over 5k results. That's a lot and the results.
Boolean Operators:
AND: Helps to narrow your search by returning materials containing the terms on either side of the operator only.
polar bears AND climate change
OR: Expands your search. returning materials contain at least one of the terms but not necessarily both terms, so with our example you could get articles about polar bears or climate change, but they might not be related.
polar bears OR climate change
NOT: an exclusionary operator. NOT with remove articles/materials containing the term on the right hand side of the operator NOT. Great when you are getting articles popping up that are somewhat related to a main term but not to your topic.
polar bears AND climate change NOT Grizzley bears
Using Search Modifiers, we can further refine our string to direct the database to the return relevant materials.
Quotation Marks " " - The search will bring back results that contain your phrase exactly as written.
"climate change" NOT "climate warming"
Parentheses ( ) - groups keywords together and will be searched first followed by keywords outside the parentheses. (Also known as nesting.)
polar bears AND ("climate change" OR "climate warming") NOT grizzly bears
Asterisk * - also known as wildcard, or truncation, it can add variation of a word to help return relevant results.
hunt* ->hunts, hunting, hunted,
polar bears AND ("climate change OR "climate warming") AND hunt*
Question Mark ? - used inside a word to represent a single character
Takes into account variations of a language, incase the word is spelled differently in the Queen's English for example
USA: Color British English: Colour
Caution will not work in SUBJECT searching and this operator can vary from database to database. Try it out and see what it does (have fun with it).
Near or Nn: This is a proximity operator represented by a capital letter N followed by a numeric value. eg: N4
The operator will find terms within that number of words from each other in any order
polar N6 bears
polar bears, polar ice cap melting effect on bears, arctic bears in the polar region,
Using Boolean Operators, Search Modifiers, and the Limiter Tools provided by the database should help you to retrieve scholarly materials which fit your search query.
To save search queries if things are NOT working out don't forget to create an account with the database. It can save you from having to copy and paste or hand write your strings.
Play with your search strings and when stuck ask your librarian for help. We are here for you.