Searching Tips

Here are some quick tips when you got too many or too few results.

Too many results?	Too few results?
Add extra search terms and combine them with AND operator. AND narrows your search. Use more specific search terms, especially for terms that have different meanings in different disciplines/contexts, e.g. use "computing architecture" instead of "architecture". Specify the search field, e.g. search within "Title", "Subject". Use exact phrase search, i.e. add quotation marks " " around your search terms Use filters to refine your search results, e.g. peer-reviewed journals, publication year range	Add synonyms or alternative search terms and combine them with OR operator. OR broadens your search. Use truncations or wildcards, e.g. transmit* finds transmit, transmitted, transmission, etc. Other than keyword searching, also perform subject heading searching, e.g. search MeSH, indexing terms in the database. Use citation chaining to explore related articles

Still confused? Learn more details about searching techniques below.

Steps to Build a Search Statement more efficiently

From the video tutorial you have learnt how to search peer-reviewed articles using OneSearch - the Basic Search, where all keywords are typed in one line. Sometimes you may not be able to get satisfactory search results when your topic involves multiple concepts. This is when Advanced Search can help.

Advanced Search allows you to build a more structured search statement. This helps you find relevant results more efficiently.

Advanced Search
	All Fields Title Subject Journal Title ...	Enter a search term
OR NOT	All Fields Title Subject Journal Title ...	Enter a search term
OR NOT	All Fields Title Subject Journal Title ...	Enter a search term
✚ Add a New Line			Search

This is how Advanced Search looks like in OneSearch and many article databases. With the multiple lines structure, you can type in keywords representing different concepts in separate lines and specify the search field for each line.

You can also apply searching techniques, e.g. combine your search terms with Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) to make your search more precise.

Here are the 4 steps to build an effective search statement.

1. Identify keywords

From the preliminary search, you may have identified a few keywords and related terms from your research question. Pick 2-4 core keywords that represent different concepts. The keywords are usually nouns or noun phrases. Watch this video to learn a few more tips about picking keywords.

Example topic: "How does artificial intelligent influence the development of smart textiles".

The keywords picked could be: artificial intelligent, smart textiles, development

2. Add keywords & combine them with "AND"

Go to OneSearch Advanced Search or an article database (e.g. Web of Science, Scopus) to build your search statement.

Use AND to combine the keywords so that the search results will include all these keywords.

To make your search more precise, you may:

Use quotation marks " " to enclose the phrase to search the terms as a phrase. This is known as a phrase search.
Specify search field, e.g. search within article title, subject, journal title.

In our case:

Advanced Search
	All Fields	"artificial intelligent"
AND	Subject	smart textiles
AND	All Fields	development
✚ Add a New Line			Search

If you run this search in OneSearch, you will notice there are very few results. This shows that the keywords you used may not be the keywords used in research papers. To make sure we do not miss out those studies, we need to expand our search by adding alternative keywords.

3. Add synonyms/alternative terms & combine them with "OR"

Use OR to combine the alternative keywords (or synonyms) so that articles containing at least one of the keywords will be included in the results.

You may also:

Use truncations * to include variants of a word, e.g. travel* searches travel, travels, traveling, etc.
Use parentheses ( ) to enclose the phrase to specify the order (terms within parentheses will be executed first).

In our case:

Advanced Search
	All Fields	artificial intelligent OR technology
AND	Subject	smart textile* OR intelligent fabric* OR smart material*
AND	Title	development OR expansion
✚ Add a New Line			Search

Check search results in OneSearch and see the difference. Note that we changed the search field of "smart textiles" to "Title" so that only articles with "smart textiles" in their title will be retrieved. This again makes our search more specific.

4. Refine search results by applying filters

The last step is to refine your search results using filters, e.g.

Peer-reviewed journals only
Publication year range
Subject category
and more

You can find similar filter options in OneSearch and many other article databases.

Don't target for a perfect search statement on your first try! It is very common to refine your search statement until you retrieve a manageable number of relevant results. You may discover new keywords or even refine your research topic during the searching process.

Read More Search Tips to learn more about Boolean Operators, Truncations, and Phrase search.

More tips on searching: Truncations, Phrase search and others!

Truncations, Wildcards

Truncations (*) and wildcards (?, #) are used to include different spellings therefore broadens your search.

E.g.

comput* searches computer, computers, computing
colo?r searches color, colour

Truncation and wildcard symbols may vary by database. Check the Help page in the database to learn the symbols and operators that database supports. (or, google database name + "operator" to locate the search help page directly).

Phrase search

Phrase search is used to search the specific expression or concepts. Usually quotation marks "" are used to search the exact phrase. Phrase search narrows your search.

E.g.

"knowledge sharing" searches only the phrase "knowledge sharing" and will NOT search knowledge creation and sharing (additional words in between) or knowledge shared

In some databases, quotation marks cannot be used with truncation or wildcards. e.g.: "knowledge shar*". Do check the Help page in the database to learn the symbols and operators that database supports.

Keyword searching vs. Subject Heading searching

Keyword searching	Subject Heading searching
Keywords are natural language words or phrases that describe the search topic. Keyword searching looks for the keywords in any field of the record (if not specified).	Subject headings are a group of "controlled vocabularies" that describe the content of each item. These controlled vocabularies are usually given by subject specialists or indexers. Subject heading searching looks for the subject heading terms in the subject heading field (e.g. Subject, Subject Terms) of the record. Commonly used subject headings include MeSH and Emtree, both are used to search biomedical literature.

Tips

Subject heading searching helps you find articles by "meaning".
e.g. search "knowledge management" by Subject returns results that may not contain the phrase "knowledge management" but discuss organizational learning (which is a related subject to knowledge management).

Keyword searching and subject heading searching can be combined.
e.g. "knowledge management" (by Subject) AND (Hong Kong healthcare)

Some databases can recommend subject headings when you do a keyword searching. After that you may select appropriate subject headings to search again.
e.g. EBSCOhost uses "Suggest Subject Terms".

Hands-on Exercise #1

Using OneSearch to find a peer reviewed journal article related to your assignment topic published in recent 5 years. Please try to apply some searching techniques (e.g. AND, OR, NOT, phrase search, etc.) mentioned.

Copy the citation from OneSearch and share it on the chat box.