Hotel, Tourism, and Events Management

How to retrieve more precise results?

We can make use of boolean operators, exact phase, truncation, wildcard, and many other techniques to retrieve more precise results, so as to save our time and effort in searching.

Boolean Operators

AND combines search terms so that each result contains all of these terms. This helps to narrow our search. e.g.: hotel AND Asia search results contain both hotel and Asia.
OR combines search terms so that each result contains at least one of these terms. We usually use OR to connect synonyms or similar concepts. This helps to broaden our search. e.g.: tourist OR traveler search results contain either tourist or traveler or both.
NOT excludes terms so that each result does not contain the term that follows it. This helps to narrow our search. e.g.: culinary NOT vegetarian search results contain culinary and without vegetarian.

Exact Phrase, Truncation & Wildcard

Exact Phrase (Search with quotation marks " ")

• Quotation marks are used to search an exact phrase. This helps to narrow down our search results.
  e.g.: 
  "knowledge sharing" search only the phrase of knowledge sharing and will not search knowledge creation and sharing (with additional words in between) or knowledge shared (terms not exactly equal to the phrase).
• Exact phrase search CAN NOT be used with truncation or wildcards, e.g. searching something like "knowledge shar*"  will not work.

Truncation (*) 

• Truncation is used to broaden our search by including various word endings and spelling. It can replace zero or multiple letters.
  e.g.1:
  Enter the root of a word and put the truncation symbol at the end:
  use manag* to search for management, manager, managerial and managing.
  e.g.2:
  Search for words that are spelled in a different way with the same meaning:
  use col*r to express both color & colour.
• Truncation symbol may vary among databases. Check the help page in the database to confirm the symbol for truncation if necessary.

Wildcard (?)

• Similar to truncation, but substitute for a single letter only.
  e.g. use wom?n to express Woman & Women. 
• Wildcard symbol may vary among databases. Check the help page in the database to confirm the symbol for wildcard if necessary.
   

Keywords vs Subject Headings

Keywords are words or phrases in natural language that describe the search topic. Keyword search looks for the keyword terms in any field of the record (if not specified) in a database.

Subject headings are controlled vocabularies that describe the content of each item in a database. These controlled vocabularies are usually given by subject specialists or indexers. Subject heading search looks for the subject heading terms in the subject heading field of the record in a database. The field name may vary by database or platform, e.g., it's called Subject in OneSearch, and called Subject Terms in EBSCOhost.

Effective Search Statement in Advanced Search

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