Finding Articles--Part 4 Searching for Articles by Topic Authored by Marianne Nolan and Ken Burhanna The text only versions provide a linear presentation of the Hands-On flash modules.  The Hands-On modules often incorporate images and interactive presentations to help demonstrate and support the text.  These images and interactive features are lost in the text only format.  Users can supplement their reading of the text versions by going onto the World Wide Web and visiting the web sites and doing the searches that the text indicates.  This is most easily done by printing the text version and using it as a guide. After completing this module you will be able to: 1. Search for Articles Using Keywords 2. Use "AND" or "OR" Operators 3. View Your Search Results 4. Limit Your Search Results Introduction Searching for articles by topic can involve searching several different indexes and resources.  In this lesson we'll use Academic Search Premier as our practice index.  This lesson will apply many of the skills we learned in earlier lessons. 1. Searching for Articles by Keyword You probably already know what keyword searching is and you've done it many times.  When you search words on a search engine like Google you are keyword searching. A keyword search (sometimes called a word or free text search) searches for words or phrases that appear in database or index records.  Keyword searching can be powerful because rather than only searching a specific field of a record, keyword searches look at several fields in a record.  In most databases, a keyword search will look in the title, subject, and abstract fields.  Many indexes include additional fields in their keyword searches. Because keyword searching looks for the exact words and phrases users enter, it can often return a large number of items, and there is no guarantee that the items are relevant to your topic.   For example, a keyword search on the word "network" may retrieve articles about: - computer networks - broadcasting networks - healthcare systems - interpersonal networking Academic Search Premier, as it is available from the University Library's web site, has keyword searching as its default search method.  This is a common way for indexes or databases to be set up. Say you're interested in distance learning.  Doing the search is a straight forward process.  Simply type your keywords in and click the search button. When looking at your search results, it's important to check the number of retrieved records.  A large number may indicate that you need to narrow your search.  A small number may mean you need to broaden your search. The results of this search (distance learning) in Academic Search Premier are very large.  How can we narrow our search? 2. Using "AND or "OR" Operators When you think about it, distance learning is a broad subject. The simplest way to narrow a search is to add an additional search term.  The "AND" operator is used to connect a second keyword to your first.  You can see that Academic Search Premier has "AND" operators in preset boxes next to the 2nd and 3rd search boxes.  The "AND" operator asks that only records containing both keywords be retrieved. Let's add the keyword phrase "home schooling" to our search. Wow, that really narrowed your search down.  Four records may be too small of a set now. Is there anyway to check for more records? We learned in the section on Research Planning Focusing Your Topic) that an important step in exploring and focusing your topic is to identify keywords and synonyms. If this doesn't sound familiar, please review this lesson. Remember keywords aren't assigned by indexers.  They are simply words that happen to appear in titles and abstracts of articles.  They are determined by authors and editors, and different authors and editors may use different terms for the same topic. One of the important uses of the keywords and synonyms you identify in exploring and focusing your topic is to use those alternate terms in your searches to insure that you're being comprehensive. Consider the following keywords generated from the topic of distance learning and home schooling. Distance learning: distance education, Internet-assisted learning. Home schooling: home-schooled, home education. How do we incorporate these alternate terms into a search without doing several different searches? We use the "OR" operator.  The "OR" operator works the opposite of the "AND" operator.  Instead of excluding records that don't contain all our terms, the "OR" operator includes all records that have one or more of our terms. We can then revise our search as follows:  (distance learning OR distance education OR Internet-assisted learning) AND (home schooling OR home-schooled OR home education) Now we get 14 records in our results.  14 is an increase of 10 records and not a bad sized set of results.   3. Viewing Your Search Results Academic Search Premier provides several options for viewing search results. On the results screen we see journal citations. To see the full record for an article, including a brief abstract, you click the underlined article title. Academic Search Premier does provide access to a great deal of full text, but full text is not available for every article that's indexed. When you see the OLinks icon followed by the words "Find a copy" this indicates that full text is not available online.   What is Find a copy?   OLinks is a linking service provided by OhioLINK.  The service checks the Scholar Catalog and other academic library catalogs in Ohio to see if the University Library holds print or other electronic copies of the title. Academic Search Premier displays the full text of articles in two ways. 1. HTML Full Text:  This displays the text of the article in a standard web page. 2. PDF Full Text:  This displays an image of the original article using the program Adobe Acrobat. 4. Limiting Your Search Results Another way to narrow your search is by limiting.  Limiting allows you to refine your search by limiting your results to full text only or to a specific time period or to a number of other variables. Click on the "Refine Search" tab to see your options for limiting. You can limit your search a number of ways.  By checking the box next to "Full Text" you will retrieve only records that include full text.   Limiting our recent search to full text removes 6 citations that did not include full text.  Be sure to explore the other options for limiting your search when you use Academic Search Premier, and remember, each index and database you use may have a different set of options.  So become comfortable exploring electronic resources. This concludes Searching for Articles by Topic.