Getting Better Results with Search

The following tutorial will show you how to get better results when using GALILEO Search.

Are you getting too many search results in GALILEO Search? Or, do you feel youíre not getting any results that work for your topic? Then, I’m going to show you a few tips that will help you get the best results possible when using GALILEO Search or any database.

I will demonstrate how to optimize your search by using keywords, synonyms, the dropdown menu, Boolean operators, and search limiters.

For our example today, we will be looking for articles on the social aspects of the use of technology among teenagers.

Let’s start with using keywords. Instead of typing phrases or full sentences when entering search terms, you will only need to type key words from your topic. For our example, we use the words “technology,” “teenagers,” and “social.”

If you’re not satisfied with the results, use our second tip - using a synonym. When choosing keywords to enter, it is sometimes helpful to use synonyms for your terms because the article may use a different term than you are using. In our example, instead of using “teenagers” we could use “adolescents,” “youth,” “teens,” or other similar words.

Another way to get better results is to use the dropdown menu beside the term to limit your search to certain fields. The dropdown menu allows you to look for that word in one particular field of the article’s bibliographic record.

The Keyword field is the broadest search and will look for your term in several places in the record, such as the title, abstract, or subject headings.

The Title, Author, and Abstract options will only look for your term in that particular field.

The Subject field will only look for your term in the subject headings for the article. This is a great way to narrow your search if you have been getting way too many results when searching by keyword.

For our example, we will choose to search only the Subject field for “technology” and “teenagers” since we want to limit our search to articles specifically on these topics.

The fourth search tip I would like to show you is how to use the Boolean operators, AND, OR, and NOT. This is a great way to narrow your search to fewer results if you have too many or to broaden your search to more results if you’re not finding anything.

In our example, we are choosing to search for technology AND teenagers AND social. This is a narrow, focused search because only articles with information about technology AND teenagers with the word social will appear in our results.

If we wanted to find articles about technology OR about teenagers, we would use OR, which would broaden our search and give us a lot more results.

If we wanted to eliminate a particular term, we would use NOT. For example, if we were interested in all types of technology except cell phones, we could use technology AND teenagers NOT cellular telephones to exclude items about cell phones.

See the tips section to help you remember how you can use AND, OR, and NOT to get better results

We will continue using AND for now since we want a few articles that include all three terms and we donít want to exclude anything.

For the last search tip, I’m going to show you how to use the search limiters.

In step 2, there are more options for limiting your search to help you get better results.

The full-text searchbox lets you limit your search to full-text articles. Please note that checking this option does not guarantee all of your results will be full text, but it certainly increases the chance that they will be.

The peer-reviewed checkbox lets you narrow your search to items that have been reviewed by experts. Please use caution when using this limiter. Different database vendors define peer-reviewed or scholarly differently, so check with a librarian or a professor if a peer-reviewed article is required for an assignment or you are not sure.

The date limiter allows you to limit your results to certain years of publication.

But, for now, we will just check the full-text option and run our search.

Our results indicate that we have 25 articles from Academic Search Complete and 12 articles from Research Library. This number of articles will be easy to review and to see if we want to use them for our paper.

If we want to make any changes to our search, as you can see, we can do this from the search results page.

A final secret to getting better results is to take advantage of the advanced search options in many databases. Look for the “Advanced Search” in any database and then use the additional options.

This concludes this tutorial on getting better results in GALILEO Search. If you have any questions, please check GALILEO Help for FAQs or use the Contact Us form to submit a comment. Thanks and Happy Searching!

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