WISER Humanities: Key Search Skills

Friday 3rd November 2006 Judy Reading and Hilla Wait

Structure of today’s session

  Presentation outlining useful search strategies Demonstration of databases to show how these strategies might work in practice  Time to explore with assistance available

OxLIP

• Oxford Library Information Platform – our gateway to electronic resources • Subject and title index  Library catalogues including OLIS  Bibliographic databases  Full-text databases  Internet sites (subject gateways)

Accessing OxLIP

 Access from any Oxford University computer  If access is needed from a non-University PC:  Should be arranged before leaving Oxford  Register for a personal Athens account  If database does not use Athens contact OUCS to arrange remote access to the Oxford University network

Where to start?

   Decide what you are searching for before you start.

Check your library for introductory texts or overviews of research in an area. Look at the bibliographies.

 Look at introductory electronic sources such as encyclopaedias.

Then spend some time thinking about the topic in more depth – you may find a mind-map or spider diagram useful  Make sure you have a system for storing the references you identify – maybe e-mail, or Refworks or an old fashioned card index

Locating original sources on the internet

 Start with OxLIP and the subject menus  Can use portals such as the Intute: Arts and Humanities gateway

http://www.intute.ac.uk/artsandhu manities/

 Can use services like Google which provide keyword searches – look at the advanced search options  Could try Internet Detective Tutorial

http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/detective/

Locating current research

 Find and join mailing lists (see http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk

) and use directories to locate active organisations and individuals  Ideas may be first expressed in conferences and recorded in conference proceedings (Various sources of information for this – see OCLC Proceedings)  New research is reported in dissertations (find listed in library catalogues, Dissertation abstracts (N.America) and Index to Theses (UK))  Current awareness services (e.g. Zetoc, My TD-Net)

Keyword & subject searching

 Keyword searching  Searches for terms anywhere in the field or record  Useful as a starting place but results can be less relevant  Subject indexes  Where possible tap into the subject headings or thesauri provided by the databases

Combining search terms

 Boolean logic  Boolean connectors : AND, OR, NOT, NEAR  AND to narrow the search  OR to broaden the search (synonyms)  Symbols for wildcards and truncation  ? for a single character  wom?n will find woman or women  s?epticism will find British and American spelling  * for truncation or variant spellings  politi* for politic, politics, political, politically etc.

OR, AND, NOT, NEAR

Television Children Obesity

Tackling an unfamiliar database

 Check the coverage of a database to see if it includes what you want   You can use cross-searching for some collections of databases to identify concentrations of useful references Use the help screens provided “and”) – check the specific conventions (e.g. do they use &, +, or   Use any subject indexes provided Databases now often offer similar functions but you may have to delve a bit to see how they do it compared with one you are familiar with

Evaluating search results

 You may need to widen or focus your search depending on what you find  How relevant is it to you? May need to find relevance in related work.

 Evaluate articles to establish how reliable the information contained e.g. is it based on research evidence – what sample size was used etc.

 – Important to evaluate for

Provenance, Currency, Objectivity, Accuracy

Putting all this into practice

 Searching for a known article  Example: Philosophers Index  Developing the search  Searching for the unknown  Keywords and subject headings  Abstracts  Full text searching  Examples: JStor, Past Masters

And Finally

 Getting help  Hands-on  Questions  Evaluation forms