You should write down keywords in groups of synonyms that express the main concepts in the search. In this search, there are two groups of synonyms:
might find diets in article 1, sugar in article 2, food additives in article 3, and dietetic in article 4. As you add more terms together with "or," the number of search results usually enlarges.
hyperactivity or adhd or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder* or attention deficit disorder*
NOT (sometimes input as AND NOT) is used to exclude a search term or previously looked at set of citations from the current set of citations that you want to retrieve. For instance, if you looked at the s3 below, and then decided to input "sugars" to possibly find more articles, you could type in s1 and sugars, resulting in a s4. Then you could type in s4 not s3 to exclude the articles you previously looked at.
As search results build up, search sets are listed which can later be reused or "tweaked":
This method allows you to reuse the results of the entire search statement only. Individual words or subsets would have to be typed in again as illustrated in the example given above in the "Sets and Search History" section. You would have to re-input the sets of synonyms as we originally did it above in s1 or s2.
Another example of nesting which also shows how the NOT operator could be useful is this: you want to find articles about social or special interest clubs, but you don t want articles dealing with health clubs, sports clubs, or athletic clubs. Type in:
clubs not (athletic or sport* or health or golf or baseball or tennis or hockey or football).
This should result in articles related to your topic. Or, you could be more specific and input:
Search - find records with this term as a subject heading.
Focus- find records with this term identified as a major subject heading
Explore - view this subject heading's hierarchical or "tree" view in the thesaurus
Expand - find records with this term as a subject heading or with a subject heading of any narrower term in the thesaurus.
Expand/Focus - find records with this term as a major subject heading or with a major subject heading of any narrower term in the thesaurus.
In most cases, you will want to click on "search." (You do not have to remember these definitions; they are displayed at the bottom of the thesaurus search results screen.) Scope notes provide additional details about a term.
A PDF from University Libraries, University at Albany, State University of New York.
Authority |
Varies at best. Difficult to verify. Cannot limit to |
Easy to determine. Most databases have |
Number of Hits |
1000’s, sometimes millions of hits, much of the |
Dozens to hundreds of hits (sometimes 1000’s |
Relevance |
Lack of subject focus can result in numerous |
Focus by subject (business, art, American history) |
Search Features |
Varies by search engine, but often limited. Can limit by document type (.doc, .pdf) or language, but |
Numerous advanced search features determined |
Access to Published |
Web information often lives and dies on the Web |
Databases deal only with published information; that is information that originally appeared in print: magazine and journal articles, books, etc. They are more stable than the Web. Through the library’s paid access, all of this information is available to you, the user, for free. |
Thanks to the University of Maryland and the University of Dallas for providing the content for this tool.