Reference Survival 6 - About Databases

SESSION 2: ABOUT DATABASES

Electronic databases can help you find magazine, journal and newspaper articles and other published information sources. The Library subscribes to a number of full text and bibliographic databases which are accessed through the library web site.

The databases may differ in the way that the screen looks or the type of information they store but essentially they all work on the same principles. Once you understand how databases work, you will be able to use almost any database.

A database is a collection of records, stored on a computer, with information about different items. When searching a database, it is helps to understand how a database is structured:
A Database is made up of RECORDS - one Record represents one article, book, video, magazine article etc.
Each record contains standardized FIELDS for information.
For example, there is a title field, subject field, author field, etc.
Fields are made up of WORDS.
The words you tell the computer to look for have to match with the words used in the field. If the word in the subject field is "adolescent" and you use "youth" or "teenager" your search won't retrieve that record even though the terms are similar. The records of a database are divided into these fields to allow the user to conduct specific searches.

For example:
If you know the author of an article but don't remember the title, you can do an author search that will retrieve all records that list that author's name in the author field.

Using a database to find information on a specific subject:
When you search for information by subject, only the subject field of a record will be searched for the words you type into the database. You are searching for specific words, that the people who created the database have assigned to the record to best describe the article (or book, video, etc.). It is necessary to know the exact terms that have been used for the subject search to work. If you type "teen pregnancy" as your subject search you may not get any results. The most commonly used words to describe that subject are "teenage pregnancy".
Many of the databases we use have Thesauri, or hierarchical subject access to assist with this.

Keyword Searching:
Searching for information by keyword permits greater flexibility. You do not need to know authors or subject headings to perform a keyword search. When you search by keyword, every field will be searched for the term(s) you have entered. However, this type of searching will also generally return more records, as well as some records that are not relevant to your topic.
Keyword searching allows you to combine terms and concepts to retrieve records for the most relevant articles, books, videos etc.

Using Boolean Operators, Nesting and other Search Limiters:
Boolean Operators can be used to combine words or terms when you search, to make a better defined search.
AND Example: teenage pregnancy AND prevention will retrieve records that contain both the word teenage as well as the word prevention.
OR Example: adolescent OR teen will retrieve records that contain either the word adolescent or the word teen or both of the words.
NOT Example: prevention NOT abortion will retrieve records that contain the word prevention only if the word abortion is not in the record.

Nesting is the use of parenthesis ( ) to put your keywords into sets. It preserves the "logic" of your keyword search.
Example: pregnancy and (adolescent or teen) This keyword search will retrieve records that contain the word pregnancy and the record must also contain either the word adolescent or the word teen or both of these words. Nesting is often used when search terms have similar meanings.

Truncation is used to find different forms of words in a keyword search. The Library catalog, uses the asterisk * as the truncation symbol.
Another commonly used truncation symbol is the question mark ?. The "help" function in the database usually tells you which symbol to use.
Example: teen* Will retrieve records that include the word teen, teens, teenager, teenage, teenagers.

Stopwords are commonly used words that will automatically stop a computer keyword search because they occur too frequently in records. Stopwords are usually listed in the help screens of the database you are using. When constructing a keyword search, choose the most important words.
Example: If you want to find information about "What programs are there to prevent teenage pregnancy in the United States?"
Your keywords are: programs, prevent, teenage, pregnancy and United States.
The words: what, are, there, to, in, and the, are not key words.
Many modern databases and internet search engines do allow ‘Natural language’ searches, but there is an increased risk of getting false hits.

Limiters let you narrow the focus of your search so that the information retrieved from the databases you search is limited according to the values you select. You can use more than one limiter if more than one is available. The use of limiters may also vary by database
Common limiters include:
Full Text – Click to limit results to articles with full text.
Cover Story – Click to limit results to articles that were featured as cover stories.
Publication - Enter a journal/magazine name in this field to limit results to articles only from that title.
Peer Reviewed - Limits search results to articles from peer-reviewed journals. Peer-reviewed journals are publications that include only those articles that have been reviewed and/or qualified by a selected panel of acknowledged experts in the field of study covered by the journal.
Date Published - Use this option to search for articles within a specified date range. Create a range by using the drop-down lists to specify the months of the range and enter the last two digits of the year in the entry fields to specify the years of the range.