SEARCHING STRATEGY.

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1 SEARCHING STRATEGY Unit Perkhidmatan Akademik Perpustakaan Tun Abd Razak (PTAR) Cawangan Selangor, Kampus Puncak Alam PTAR Kampus Puncak Alam Dikemaskini : Januari 2017

2 WHY? To get relevant results To save time going through irrelevant information To go beyond Googling: retrieving anything and everything HOW? Enable you to quickly retrieve relevant information from the thousands of records in a database. By using the following methods below you can make your search statement specific and increase the chance of retrieving relevant information.

3 Boolean Operators or = any of the terms may be present and = all terms must be present not = excludes specific search term using and operator narrows the search 3

4 AND: is used to narrow your results. Focus the search when you have multiple search terms. OR: is used to broaden the results by using two or more similar concepts NOT: narrows the search as you exclude certain concepts

5 Boolean Operators PTAR UiTM Selangor

8 Truncation: Truncation will help you find something if you don t know how to spell a word. Is a technique that broadens your search to include various word endings and spellings. To make sure you get all variations of a word, use the truncation symbol. In most databases, this symbol is an asterisk *

9 Truncation examples International spellings o theat* theater, theatre, ALSO theatrical Various endings o comput* computer, computing, computation o psycho* psychology, psychopathic, psychopathology, psychotherapy Use as many common letters as possible o colon* colonoscopy, colonization, colon, colony o coloni* colonization, colonies, colonialism

10 psycho* psychology, psychopathic, psychopathology, psychotherapy PTAR UiTM Selangor

11 Wildcard Wildcards substitute a symbol for one letter of a word. This is useful if a word is spelled in different ways, but still has the same meaning. For example: searching for educat* would tell the database to look for all possible endings to that root. Results will include educate, educated, education, educational or educator. A question mark (?) may be used to represent a single character, anywhere in the word. It's most useful when there are variable spellings for a word, and you want to search for all variants at once. For example, searching for colo?r would return both color and colour.

12 Wildcard Symbols? = Match exactly one letter # = Match zero or one letter * = Match multiple letters

13 Wildcard Examples Match multiple letters International spellings o orthop*dic orthopedic, orthopaedic Related concepts o psych*y psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, psychopathy Replace entire word o A Midsummer * dream A midsummer night s dream

14 psych*y psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, psychopathy PTAR UiTM Selangor

15 Phrase Searching: Phrase Searching means searching for two or more words as an exact phrase. Phrase searching is achieved by putting quotation marks around the phrase. The search engine/online database will return only hits that have the exact phrase with the words in the exact order. Example: fever treatment fever treatment fever treatment

16 fever treatment = Search Results 4,799 PTAR UiTM Selangor

17 fever treatment = Search Results 128 PTAR UiTM Selangor

18 fever treatment = Search Results 135 PTAR UiTM Selangor

19 fever treatment = Search Results 286,307 PTAR UiTM Selangor

20 fever treatment = Search Results 868 PTAR UiTM Selangor

21 fever treatment = Search Results 9 PTAR UiTM Selangor

22 Advanced Searching : Helps you to narrow your search and access more relevant results. PTAR UiTM Selangor

23 Field Search / Search Limiters Common fields include: Author, title, journal title, abstract, publisher, date/year of publication, subject/descriptor The same applies on search engines, fields: web, images, news, maps etc. Search limiters (sometimes called Filters) are powerful ways to focus your search results so that you don t have to look through lots of irrelevant items to find what you re looking for.

24 Field Search PTAR UiTM Selangor

25 Filters / Refine Search PTAR UiTM Selangor

narrow down the results) Mark Online Database Search

26 Formulate search query using Boolean, Truncation, Wildcards, etc. Sort by relevance Refine search (e.g. narrow down the results) Mark Online Database Search Tips Save Results Download more than 1 PDF at one time

27 Please Contact: Nurul Diana Jasni

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Organize Collaborate Share. By: Organize Collaborate Share By: Perpustakaan Tun Abdul Razak (PTAR) Kampus Puncak Alam Unit Perkhidmatan Akademik Updated: Januari 2017 Agenda What is Mendeley? Creating your library Managing your documents