By Staff Writer Jerri Clewis
Many assignments and projects college students face require citations and sources, but finding reliable sources of information can be challenging.
The world wide web is excellent for a lot of things. Anyone can find anything with a quick search, but that ease of access is not without problems. Just as anyone can discover available information, anyone can create content that seems trustworthy and reliable but is anything but. That’s where a library database comes in handy.
Unlike the web, library databases generally contain peer-reviewed content written by experts, making databases trustworthy places for researchers to find information. However, despite their usefulness, library databases have a learning curve.
In most browsers, users can use natural language and sentences to find something. Still, they sacrifice precision in doing so for often unreliable information. In comparison, a database provides precise and dependable results but at the loss of natural language.
A database utilizes keyword searches and Boolean operators to provide the best results. Keywords mean the most important words in the topic being searched. For example, a person researching “the history of cats” on a database would use only “history” and “cats.”
The results of those two words would be better, though. That’s where Boolean operators come in. Boolean operators include simple words AND, OR, NOT, or AND NOT. Those words are part of why natural language doesn’t yield good results on databases because everyday words can act as an operator or function in a database—changing the search entirely.
In the case of the search, a person would likely use “history AND cats” to narrow the results to sources containing both terms. If they want one or the other, they could use “history OR cats.” It works the same for using NOT or AND NOT, telling the system which terms to include or exclude.
Boolean operators are a great way to narrow a search to sources with the desired information. Still, a search can also be too narrow and provide few results. In that case, it is best to broaden the search. This search can be done with the wildcard system, which includes symbols like “*,” “&,” “!”, “?” and even “$.”
A wildcard is used by adding the symbol to a keyword to replace a character or characters. For example, history can become “hist*,” which yields results with any form of hist like history, historical, and historic.
Be careful when using wildcards because a misplaced wildcard can have unexpected results. For instance, “cat*” can bring up categorized, catastrophe, catchphrase, and catheterize. Another thing to remember is that wildcards vary between databases, so check in with the library or database information to see which symbol should be used.
Library databases can be complicated at first, but anyone can find the perfect sources for their project with practice. Remember, the library is always there to help if a student needs help figuring out where to begin or what to search