POLT 403F – Politics Senior Honors: How to look: Strategies

Advanced searching involves using boolean operators, multiple terms, and filters to capture as many relevant results as possible, and to narrow results to those truly relevant.

The most common boolean operators are OR, AND, and NOT. 

Note: Implementation varies across databases; to increase your chances of success, capitalize the above boolean operators—it isn't always necessary, but it won't hurt.

Other operators include double quote [""] and parenthetical [()] enclosure, and the asterisk [*], question mark [?], and minus operator [-].

Double quote enclosure allows you to require matching for an exact word or phrase.

A search for "bull horn" will return very different results than a search for bull horn.

Parenthetical enclosure allows you to override the order of operations; in boolean search, OR typically processes before AND, and AND typically processes before NOT. 

A search for (continental AND plate) OR shelf will return very different results than a search for continental AND plate OR shelf.

The asterisk and question mark serve as a wildcard operators.

The question mark allows for one variable character.

A search for b?ll should return results that include the strings ball, bell, bill, boll, and bull—but not baall.

The asterisk allows for any number of variable characters, or no variable characters at all.

A search for continen* should return results that include the strings continence, continent, continental, and continents.

A simple search with boolean operators might look like:

"continental plate" OR "continental shelf" OR "tectonic plate" NOT "continental breakfast"

Cited-reference searching returns results that cite a given resource, which is supplied as the search term(s). Exploring these results helps to elucidate the reception of the given resource, and also to identify other relevant resources.

The databases highlighted below have built in cited-reference search capability.

Lateral reading is one of many source evaluation techniques that you will want to employ in your research. Lateral reading involves going outside of a resource to discover the reception of that resource within the scholarly conversation. 

If you are using the resources mentioned in the previous section (e.g., book reviews, literature reviews, bibliographies), then you are already employing this technique.

Another great way to perform lateral reading is to perform simple internet searches for the article title, author name(s), institutions supporting the research or affiliated with the author(s), the publisher, and the publication.

When performing lateral reading, consider that authority in one field of study does not necessarily translate to other disciplines.

Authority is constructed and contextual—e.g., a professor of physical chemistry affiliated with a prestigious research institution has an authority when publishing in The Journal of Chemical Physics; the longer that professor has been publishing respected articles in the field, the more significant that authority. However, that authority by no means carries over to publications by the same professor in the field of literary criticism or cultural anthropology. 

Learn more about lateral reading—and other useful approaches—in our guide Source Evaluation Techniques.

Library catalogs and databases often enable subject, topic, or author keyword searching.

Subject or topic terms are often stored in controlled vocabularies: these lists of terms and their definitions prepared and maintained by subject experts, and experts in the field of library and information science. The uniform nature of controlled vocabularies facilitates both searching and browsing.

Author keywords are terms chosen by authors when preparing work for publication, and can make it easier to discover resources—particularly when only an abstract is available, or when full-text searching is not enabled. Author keywords are not required to conform to existing controlled vocabularies, and for this reason, browsing for author keywords may not return as many results as expected, or may not be an option.

To search by subject in most databases, select Subject, Topic, or Author Keyword as the search type. To browse by subject, look for hyperlinked terms that appear under Subject or Topic headings in the resource record.