Advanced Online Search Techniques

We’ve talked about online research before, but now we’re going to take that further. Simple searches will produce results for common topics. The One Search tool and browser searches, like Googling, just show a small percentage of the total information available related to those search words. To write a scholarly research essay, it’s important to move beyond the basic searches. Otherwise, there’s no point in taking a college class – you already know how to type stuff into a search bar, what we’ll be doing from now on is more complex. You’ll practice using the Advanced Search feature in databases, search with techniques like Boolean Operators, and conduct searches to find specific types of documents, instead of relying on whatever a general search pulls up.

This page will cover a few in-depth search techniques:

• Understanding what a database is
• Choosing a Relevant Database
• Boolean Searches
• Advanced Searches
• Boolean Operators
• Boolean Modifiers

What is a database?

Databases are digital collections of information. Highline College has paid subscriptions to multiple databases to provide all of the college community access to articles, statistics, and information from high quality sources. The video “What are Databases and Why You Need Them” explains further.

Choosing a Relevant Database

When we click the Databases link on the library home page, we can see a list of popular databases, but we can also view an alphabetical list of databases, view databases by subject, and even look at databases that contain books, videos, and reference sources like encyclopedias.

If we look at the databases by subject, we can see there are groups for Psychology, Health & Medicine, etc. There are 4 databases that include Psychology-specific information, and 20 that include Health & Medicine-specific information. If you were doing some research about student test anxiety, these databases and the education databases would give you the most relevant scholarly results.

Advanced Searches

Many databases, and even One Search, have an feature called Advanced Search. Advanced searches provide multiple separate search boxes and allow you to customize how those words relate to each other, and if the search should be limited to only one field. Experiment with different search terms, field options, and operators. You can do a lot of modification with filters after the search, but some searches will work better if you narrow them down first.

Some simple ways to optimize search results:

• Modify the date field. Most academic work will require some foundational knowledge from the past, but mostly current information released in the few years.
• Use synonyms for common terms. When I do education research I use university, college, post-secondary in searches.
• Use Boolean Operators: Boolean operators are words and symbols that give a specific instructions to the search engine or database. These can give you better results because they allow you to target or exclude certain results. For example, if I’m trying to find ideas for something at home, I always exclude Pinterest because I HATE Pinterest.

The following videos explain some of the most useful advanced search methods.

Searching the Library Databases

The video Citing & Searching is about running searches on the Highline Library webpage and using the citation button to quickly create MLA (or other) style citations right within the search results.

Advanced Google Searching

This video gives a brief review of using advanced techniques that work in Google and other browsers.