Strategies of searching online resources

 A search strategy is the systematic action plan which is drawn to conduct a search. The process of planning a search strategy help to clarify thinking about topic, and ensure the information appropriate to task. Taking time to plan before starting searching save time once start exploring the resources and provides greatly improved results. It help to find the materials amongst the huge number of online resources available. Knowledge about the nature and organization of target database and exact needs of the user is required while developing a good search strategy.

Search strategies are listed below:

1. Understand the topic

It is very much important to understand the topic (question) before finding any information. If meaning of any word, name, place  is not sure then check it up before start. Dictionaries, encyclopedias, books, web and discussion with supervisor can help to solve this problem.

2. Identify  the keywords and phrases

Once you understand the topic, find out the main words or phrases, known as keywords or key phrases. They indicates what the topic or question is all about. Write as many as different terms related to topic to develop list of keywords. Its better to break down search topic into sections.

3. Identify the synonyms and related terms

Identifying the synonyms and related term helps to ensure the information as needed. Sometimes the database might have indexed using different words than you have identified, even if they are on exactly the same topic. Therefore, to ensure information about topic, identification of different words and phrases might be used to describe it.

4. Development of search statement

There are many ways to create search statements.

a) Phrase searching: For searching exact phrase, put search phrase in quotation marks "...". Eg. "Searching strategy ". Similarly, to exclude the term from search result use the dash or minus before the word to bel excluded. Eg. HIV-AIDS (article about HIV will only be retrieved excluding AIDS).

c) Truncation is a searching technique used in databases in which a word ending is replaced by a symbol. Frequently used truncation symbols include the asterisk (*), a question mark (?) or a dollar sign ($). Truncation enables different forms of a word to searched for simultaneously, and will increase the number of search results found. Examples: gene$ will search for results containing; gene, genes, genetic. Similarly, Bio* will search for results containing; biology, bionic, biosynthesis, biophysical etc.

d) Boolean logic: Search terms may be combined using Boolean logic, so that the most relevant results are obtained. Three logical commands/ operator available in most of search software are OR, AND and NOT.

OR – search for articles that have either search term before or after the OR. For example: type football OR soccer to search articles about either ‘football’ or ‘soccer’.

AND – search for articles that contain all words before and after the AND. For example: type pollution AND death to search for articles that include both ‘pollution’ and ‘death’.

NOT – eliminate articles that have the term after the NOT. For example: type surfing NOT Internet to search articles that include ‘surfing’, but exclude articles with the word, ‘Internet’ (Internet surfing).

5. Review and refine search

Different databases use different search terms to describe same subject so they should be reviewed and refined accordingly once you have done the surveyed the results from first search. Results that are unappropriated should be excluded and if the data are not sufficient start collecting.

REFERENCES 

1. Chaudhary, G.G (2004). Introduction to modern information retrieval. 2 nd ed. London: Facet Publishing.

2. www.butte.edu