Okay, so we're just about at the 1030 mark. Um.
We'll come back everyone, um, I just wanted to take a moment to, uh, introduce Rosalyn and Grandy. Um, so she is going to be walking us through a presentation on search strategy or strategies for searching Yukon library databases.
So, Roslyn, thank you. So much for joining us today really appreciate your time and take it away.
All right. Thanks so much that good morning. Everyone.
My name is Ralph and Randy.
And this workshop is adapted from a workshop that I run for the general UConn community.
So, welcome to strategies for searching Yukon library databases.
A little bit about myself before I jump into the content, I am the pharmacy librarian here.
So, my specialty is how science.
Biomedical databases, but I also do provide general research support.
And I got a lot of requests.
From the workshops that I offer, so sometimes I'm.
From our chat, and from those requests I'm doing.
A lot of general research support as well. I just put my contact info up here.
And I will be sharing the slides with that so you can access this later and you're also welcome to take your own notes.
All right. Oh, of course I've forgotten to put it in presentation on.
So some of the content.
May be pretty elementary to you as.
School media specialist, but I wanted to make sure that we cover the basics.
Kind of before we go into more advanced features of searching databases.
So, a database could be described as a collection of data that is searchable.
It's also stored and accessed electronically.
The main components of database are.
Metadata, so that would be things that describe objects included in a database not necessarily the actual item itself.
Sometimes it's a physical items sometimes it's a PDF.
Sometimes it's an audio file, so pieces of metadata are key elements.
Of a database, because they describe the object.
And enable you to retrieve it. So this will be things like.
The title author a citation.
All of those citation elements and abstract.
Subject terms so controlled vocabulary.
That is assigned to that specific item in the database.
And then they also include things like limiters.
So, things such as date publication location.
Price a lot of different limiters that could be included in the database.
So, it's likely that you have encountered databases in your daily life, even if you've never used an academic database.
Amazon could be considered a database because it has.
Items so records.
That describe physical items.
We have titles here prices. We have a lot of different ways to limit.
So, by department, by how many stars that got.
By brand my price. So, academic databases have a lot of these same features.
We just kind of have to translate it to an academic setting.
And I do, I have the chat open, so if there are any questions.
During the workshop, you are welcome to use the chat or wait until we have a few minutes at the end.
So, the databases that we subscribed to cover a lot of different kinds of content.
Uh, the primary source type would be scholarly articles, but we also have newspapers trade publications. So, things that are specific to.
A certain industry reviews of books.
Reference material, so that would be Encyclopedia type things.
Electronic books dissertations, theses, gray literature.
As well, as streaming audio.
And visual content, so I'm just going to show.
Very briefly snapshot of a few databases that we have.
So this is an database which you're probably very familiar with this interface.
So, we have items here.
So these are references to different articles.
Plus limiters over here on the left and then you can search.
By keywords in a variety of ways. This is Scopus.
So this is a citation index.
Which kind of covers a lot of.
Different databases across disciplines.
So, if you are wanting to be really comprehensive with whatever topic you are looking at.
Or you were wanting to get citation data so what's the most highly.
Cited article that matches my search terms.
This 1 rises to the top or things about.
The citation impact of a specific author or a specific Journal.
That can all be found in scope is.
And you can also get it links to full text.
So, it will make you to full text of all of these articles.
But it is more comprehensive than a subject specific database, because it is multidisciplinary.
So, I did want to.
Do a little note about how some of our databases include full text and some of them just.
Link to full text. Some of them are just abstract and indexing.
Some of them are a hybrid.
So this is from the 1st database that I showed you academic search.
And if it has this PDF full text, that means we have it immediately available.
And you come full text button means we will look to see if we have it.
And if not, it can be requested via inter library loan.
That's kind of what those different things mean.
Why is it important to learn strategies to search a database?
A few reasons 1 would be to move a topic from the way it's worded in your brain.
To how it is worded in established literature.
And this can't really save you some time and effort when you're searching.
If you figure out which how to combine terms, which search operators to use.
That can really save you from having to manually look through everything or do citation chasing.
Can help you eliminate.
Things that are irrelevant and also, if you are wanting to be systematic about your search, so fine.
Everything that could be that has been published.
On a topic, you can get really comprehensive results.
So this is kind of a breakdown of.
Moving from a topic to a thesis statement.
And the part that I really want to focus on is.
The databases work based off of keywords.
And combining keywords in a meaningful way.
They don't really work very well if you put in a whole statement or sentence or a question.
They work better if you combine key words and synonyms.
4 different concepts, so this is just kind of a brainstorm of different words for.
Jeff, these could be thrown for that and then.
We also want to look at athletes we want to look at equality.
And how that plays out in high schools.
so these are our different facets of our search and then different ways to word that
That could be used in a database. Um, so, let me.
Kind of show you what that would look like. So here, if I just copied and pasted that sentence.
Do does students have enough opportunities to engage in school sports?
The initial query doesn't yield results.
It goes off and finds a lot of things and things I'm looking for.
But that search is not very precise.
Whereas this is much more precise.
By putting in those keywords with.
Different synonyms and connecting them with and.
So, I'm going to go over exactly what that is in a minute, but I just wanted to kind of.
Do that as an overarching concept that keep keywords in mind rather than.
Natural language. All right I'm going to start with our discovery search. I'm just going to point out a few things about it.
mainly to distinguish it from
Our subject specific databases, so you could think of it as an academic Google or a mega database.
So this is something that searches all of our content at once.
A lot of different source types here.
So, books, ebooks, articles, open, access, content.
If you have a really specific topic, discovery might be a good place to go.
Or if you're looking for background information, it's also a good place to start.
And it does work with or other citation managers.
So, I'm going to go into discovery now.
and i'm just gonna start with a search on
Sports alright, so we got 703 results.
three results
And I really wanted to point out the resource types here.
Articles books, conference, proceedings, dissertations.
Reference entries, so that would be the Encyclopaedia stuff.
Media web resources, reviews of books.
The only thing that discovery doesn't include.
Would be newspapers, so if you want to do that as a separate search, you can.
from here or down at the bottom so here we're getting forty nine thousand results
With our sports topic.
And you can also limit by Journal title here. So if you wanted the times.
The Guardian in New York Times, you can limit it that way.
But for most academic concepts.
especially if you are wanting just peer reviewed journals
Discovery might be a good place to start.
However, it can be a little bit overwhelming.
All right. I.
I'm going to talk a little bit about before I do another search on discovery.
Civilian was named after the person who.
Invented at George ball and.
And it just means using and or not to either limit or expand your search.
And an, or and not sorry are going to.
Make your search more now, whereas or will broaden it.
Something to note, is that most databases default to and.
So, even though you don't type in, and if you type in multiple terms, it's connecting them.
With an end, I've put a link to a video tutorial if you want to learn more about.
So use, and when you want your search to get more now.
Def is going to be a much more broad search than death and sports and teenagers.
Or is really good for combining synonyms or related terms.
So we could say deaf or hard of hearing or hearing impaired.
And then not eliminates whatever term.
It proceeds, so that's something that I would suggest using sparingly.
Sometimes it will eliminate.
results that are relevant so i'm just be careful when you're using that
And then you can use what is called nesting.
To combine certain facets of your search so we could do.
Deaf or hard of hearing those in parentheses.
And sports or athletics.
I'll talk about the asterisk and the quotation marks.
In a later slide.
but we don't let's say sport or
We but not fix. We can kind of.
Put those, those in their own.
Parentheses and teen or students.
So, let me just show you how these kind of.
Hand out in discovery.
Death and sports and teenagers, we got only 12 results with that.
So, if we expand a little bit, add some synonyms to our search.
Um, different ways to explain these concepts.
It went up to 279.
So, that is kind of the value of learning these different tools.
Databases is that you.
Can avoid the overwhelming amount or not enough amount.
Of results, right?
Another concept that I want to go over before I jump into another database is controlled vocabulary.
So this is using standardized predefined terms to describe a topic.
It is the standard way to refer to that idea or that concept within a specific database.
So, subject terms, mesh headings if you've heard of that in.
The source is a place that those are listed.
And it's distinguished, it's separate.
From natural language, so that would be the keywords.
Things that you a way that you might.
Typically discuss that in normal conversation.
Control vocabulary is assigned by trained indexers.
A lot of it these days is done.
By artificial intelligence, so their training.
A program to index things for them.
Occasionally there are things that are missed or mislabeled.
This was an example that I came across in.
so this is an article about pharmacists working with primary care organizations
And the authors kind of created their own acronym of.
And the auto indexing feature of.
And said, Ah, I know what that is. polycystic ovarian syndrome.
Which is actually not what this article is about. So these were assigned an error.
So, I actually contacted pub and had them remove these.
These are the actual match terms so controlled vocabulary that are.
Relevant to this article so I often tell people that if you want to be really comprehensive and make sure that you're getting everything.
Use natural language as well as the control vocabulary.
In combination in a different database.
This is how the subject terms.
Um, look, so if you click on gender inequality here, you can see everything.
Within academic search premiere that has that.
Tag gender inequality, and you can see that they differ from the keywords.
That were supplied by the author, so.
They use gender equality, whereas gender inequality is the 1 preferred by.
Academics entrepreneur.
I also want to draw your attention to the usefulness of quotation marks.
Databases are pretty smart about keeping concepts together, but occasionally they will pull up.
Irrelevant results if you don't search.
Something as a phrase, so Leopard seal with quotation marks.
Is most likely going to pull up exactly what you're looking for?
Whereas Leopard and seal could pull up a relevant things. So, things about leopards.
Or seals that are not leverage skills.
And then transition is another tool.
The actual symbol for it varies based on the database.
But in most databases, it is the asterisk.
And it will find everything that has a certain combination of letters as the root of a word.
So, child asterisk will find child child.
Children or childhood, something that I use in my research would be a library.
And I cut it off here so that it would find both library with the Y, as well as librarian librarians or librarianship.
These next 2.
Search strategies are.
Not used as often, but I did want to bring them up so that you're aware of them.
Wildcards can do a couple of things they can.
Kind of swap out of character so if we do the question mark here, we would, it would pull up meet nest or next.
It can also search for spelling variants of a word.
So, if you are looking at British Canadians, spelling.
You may want to use a wildcard.
And then proximity searching can also be helpful.
Depending on what you are looking for, this, finds the.
a currency of a word within a certain number of words of another
And if you use the and operator.
That finds them regardless of order, whereas the W, operator.
Makes the order.
More structured I also found out recently that.
google's scholar actually has proximity operators so they use around.
So, if we wanted to look at medical or health.
And we were wanting to find records that occurs.
Within 3 words of medical or health, that's what.
That search would accomplish.
So those 2 are not used as frequently.
It's more an advanced searching that I find.
Those to be useful so sometimes discovery can be overwhelming.
And it's best to go to a subject specific database.
If you want to also search a carefully curated collection.
On a subject within a discipline that would be a time to use a database.
Also, the limiters indexing tools, control vocabulary.
Is really limited in discovery. Where is that's going to be.
A lot more sophisticated in a subject specific database.
We have a lot of different types of databases.
I've put just a few up here to give you an idea.
We have some psychology databases, like, infos what we're going to look at today.
Education some of them are multi disciplinary as well.
And from our home page, you can limit that.
So, I will show you how that looks.
So live that you cannot.
And then you're going to click on databases.
And if you want to limit my subjects, you can click up here.
And we're going to do psychology for the next example.
So these are kind of the main databases for that topic.
And here are some others that may be tangential. The.
Relevant so then I'm going to go to psych info.
So this is an SQL database, which a lot of you are probably familiar with.
I'm going to do a test for testing. I search.
For testing college students, and I just.
Kind of wanted to show you what the numbers would be. If.
We were doing discovery, so we would get almost 9,000 if we did this in discovery.
Here and here.
We are getting 200.
Another thing that I want to point out with this is something you need to execute databases. You can search multiple at a time.
So this is kind of an, in between discovery and 1 database.
Is just selecting a few so, let's say I wanted to add a few more that might be relevant for this topic.
So, I'm going to add, like, articles since it's related to education, I'm going to add Eric.
And then we could also look at this from kind of a sociological.
Perspective, so I'm going to do index.
So you can see up here that all of those are being searched.
Now, so we went from 199 in just like, info.
Up to 323, adding those other databases.
But we are not quite at the discovery level of results.
So this is a really good thing.
Especially with social science topics that I find to be helpful.
The limiters get less sophisticated, the more databases you add.
So that's just something to note.
So, I am going to remove these for now and go back to info.
Right so a lot of things to point out with the search results here.
As you can see this has both.
Linked full text as well as we're going to look for the full text. We don't guarantee necessarily that we have it.
Once you click on the title, you get to the complete record for that item.
There are a lot of pieces of information here.
So these are those keywords which differ from the control vocabulary the subject terms.
So these are kind of the standardized ways that this article has been tagged.
You can see that. It also has.
These classifications which are unique to psych info.
These kind of also act as controlled.
Vocabulary this will tell you if certain scales that have been developed or.
Instruments have been used in this study.
And in this case, there are 4 that are mentioned.
And then we've got the normal citation information, like.
Journal title.
I did want to point out all of the tools here. The main ones that I find useful for students.
Especially if they're not at their own machine at the time, you can put in your email here.
Send that to yourself to make sure that you can access it again.
It will also create citations for you so you want to make sure that you don't.
Except the citation they give you, because sometimes there could be little mistakes.
But this is really good for getting started with a citation.
And you can also get that here copy and paste that. So you can access it later. So you can.
Attitude your bibliography and go over it.
Check it for accuracy with a style manual.
Permanent is also really helpful because.
This link will take you back to that page, whereas.
Using the link up here in the browser won't really work well, with most databases.
And then export, if you happen to be using.
A citation manager, they'll do direct export to reference.
Or you can download it in different formats that would work with multiple citation managers.
All right.
A couple other limiters that I wanted to point out here on the left.
We could limit by publication.
So this would be like, name of the publication.
Within like info, they actually are pretty.
Well, Index, even down to different age ranges.
Different genders that test and measures, which I had brought up earlier.
If we want to find everything that used the state treat anxiety inventory.
That fits all search terms, we could do that. And then, depending on what your topic is, you may want to limit to human or animal studies.
And so a lot of different ways to limit after you have searched.
If you go to advanced, you can see even.
More about how this database is indexed.
So, if you and again, this is advanced, so I realize that you may never use any of these features.
But let's say that you want to make sure that there is a dataset in the supplemental.
Supplementary material of the articles retrieve.
You can do that. You can set the date before you search. You can also use it the slider after.
You search, you can limit to different languages here.
Type of publication, um.
Those age grapes, the age groups are all listed here so you can see what they are before you do the search.
If you want to know what those classification codes, which I mentioned earlier are.
And let's say you want to search.
Attention or.
Health Psychology testing a lot of different codes that are available there.
And then methodology is another really important thing, especially if you are.
I'm wanting to limit to clinical trials or.
Different types of studies.
Or, let's say you want to do more qualitative.
Think that this would be the way to limit.
By that here, um.
We see what else wanted to point out here.
You can also limit to full text if you want everything that's available right now.
He reviewed if you want things that are.
Scholarly material, and then those tools which are available from the record page.
All right another facet of.
Sql database is that is kind of helpful.
Is it? Well.
If you start typing in a search term, it will kind of do boolean for you.
So it will say, oh, do you.
Want to include these other synonyms for testing ID.
And then I can say all these concepts together and.
If I type start typing in college students and it'll say predict different ways to express that.
And so this is going to expand.
My search, we're getting different results here.
Higher number of results, so this.
Feature of using connecting similar concepts with, or is available in any database.
But the esco databases do predict it for you.
You're welcome to use what they give you or change it.
Something else that I want to point out here is.
Um, yeah.
So, if you go up to the, the, this is where you can actually look up, what is the controlled vocabulary.
For this idea.
So, if I type in undergraduate, so undergraduates is actually not the.
Preferred term it's telling us use college students.
So, if I wanted to add that to my search.
That is the control vocabulary.
In this database for that concept.
I also wanted to show you.
How we can do some Boolean next in here.
So, if you're going to do nesting, I recommend you do that all in 1.
Line and I'm also going to add.
There's a lot of different fields.
So, I'm just going to limit to title right now.
Let me show you kind of how I'm doing this nesting.
By the end here.
All right, so.
This search will find test anxiety .
Synonyms and college students, plus synonyms.
But only mentioned in the title.
So, from 2500.
Down to 177 so this is a really good way to make sure that you.
Are retrieving articles where that is? The main idea is limiting to title another thing that we could do.
Is also look in the abstract so if I limit to abstract here.
So, we're searching for all of our terms and either the title or the abstract.
So, that's going to expand it a little bit. So, I went from 197 to.
1800.
Then another really helpful tool that I want to point out is search history.
So that is kind of under these boxes.
Search history is really great because you can go back.
And see, what was my initial search.
How many did it retrieve? Did this expand it too much?
Did this expand it? Not enough so you can actually go and.
Modify these searches, you can copy and paste them.
And most databases do have.
This feature in them.
Something else I could even do is.
If I wanted to combine a search, I could do I want to do this 1.
Or this 1, I could do search with or.
Oh, good.
Kind of works better from.
The search box. All right so.
This is not doing what I wanted to do.
Why you never go off script?
Basically, what I want to get out with the search history.
Is that you can kind of see how your search changes.
Based on what kind of limiters? Expanders.
Like, here, I limited to last 10 years.
So, that took it from 1600 to 409.
Kind of what am I losing or gaining when I change my search.
That is kind of what it will help you to do. I also wanted to show controlled vocabulary in a different database. So.
I'm going to go into med.
So databases, and this is an list.
So, if I want, I can just do control f, and pull it up.
And mesh is actually the name of the database that has control of vocabulary.
So, if I type in.
Heart attack I can see that the preferred term within the.
Database for that is myocardial infarction.
And I could even get more specific if I want to focus on treatments. So, therapy for myocardial infarction.
I could add that to my search, so that's going to be.
How much more specific search um.
Then so we've got 80,000 here.
And if I just do heart attack, that's 289,000.
All right I'm going to.
Quickly show you some different database interfaces.
Um, just to kind of point out that.
Even though it looks a little different. A lot of the same tools are available.
So here is where kind of those title abstract person.
Author, those search operators would be located.
And it has kind of the same boxes that you can use.
Boolean to create searches, or you can do everything within 1 search box.
And then these are like, the research ways to limit and this is our.
Linguistics, mainly with 6 database.
I'm also going to show you, which is our.
Music database.
If we go to advanced search up here, um.
So this is kind of what I was getting at with yes.
Thank you.
With that level of sophistication with subject specific databases.
You can even search by featured instrument.
Time period, the name of the lyricist versus the name of the composer.
Versus the name of the performer, so a lot of ways to limit.
Based on that subject Nexus Uni is 1 of our legal databases.
And sometimes if you.
Get to a database interface and you really don't know what to do. There will be a help page.
Somewhere links, so this can kind of help you searching Nexus unique basics, guided search. What are the connectors.
What are the controlled vocabulary in the database?
You can also just.
Google for that, if you don't know where to find it on the databases.
Page and there will be tutorials from Lexis Nexis.
Themselves sometimes you'll find it from other.
Libraries who have created tutorials on searching that resource.
So that is a really good thing to note.
I wanted to give you a concrete example of a time that I used.
Kind of these advanced features of combining search operators.
In a database my.
1 of my departments that I serve asked me to pull up a list of their publications in.
So the way that I did that in Scopus, I did pharmaceutic truncated.
With affiliation of University of Connecticut and and then I put all of our authors.
Name or last name I used author name when it was a more common name.
And then I added limit.
Publication here, because they were looking for within a certain.
Year similar search for pub, but there are different search operators.
Field tags here, so it looks slightly different. Um.
But that was 1 time that.
Knowing how to combine all of those different.
Search operators was really helpful.
This is another thing that I always present in my workshops.
Just because I get this question a lot if you are out in the wild searching within invaded database within Google Scholar, wherever you are, and you want to know, does you can have this.
The best way to do that is to go find find citation type in either the ID.
If you don't have 1 of those, you could use the title.
And from there, it will tell you. Yes, we have it. And here's the database where it is.
Or, no, we don't and you can request it so really important.
Thing to know, find find by citation.
This is.
I will put this in the chat. Not a guy that I need, but.
Zack and his group maintain that guide and it does go over.
Several of the things that I went over today.
I did want to reiterate that I will be sharing the slides.
But and I can also hang out if we have some questions.
But, if not thanks for attending and good luck this semester.
Thank you so much Roslyn. So, um, let's see, we've got.
About 7 more minutes here before the end um, if anybody has any questions, please feel free to throw them in the chat um, or, um, also just feel free to come off Mike and escalate.
Okay, since I'm not hearing from anybody, um, we'll go ahead and, um, in this session for right now, Roslyn, again, thank you so much for joining us. We really, really appreciate it. And if you guys have any.
Questions feel free to throw him in the chat and we'll pick those up. Um, uh, as we go along very much thanks.