GSFS 320 — "Scripting the Body" - Performative Methods in Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies: How to look: Strategies

A nuanced search with boolean operators might look like:

plate* AND (continental OR tectonic) NOT "continental breakfast"

AND, OR, NOT

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

The OR operator returns results that match either term.

The AND (or ampersand [&], on some platforms) operator limits results to those which match both terms.

The NOT operator (or the minus sign [-], on some platforms) excludes results that match the immediately following term. 

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.

Enclosure

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

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 specify the order of operations:

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

Wildcard operators

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.

Our guide to Source evaluation techniques describes techniques that our librarians find useful for evaluating source reliability.

There are no hard and fast rules as to which technique works best for evaluating a source. As a critical information consumer, you would do well to become familiar with at least two of these methods, and to build the habit of pausing to use them when you encounter new sources.

Across all of these techniques, some core principles emerge:

• Always think critically about how a source you are considering relates to your research question. Whether a source is reliable is not an immutable, fixed characteristic of the source. A recent biology paper studying the Ailuropoda melanoleuca genome is probably not a reliable way to get information about the experience of women in the Cold War! 
• Authority is constructed and contextual. Different people have expertise in different areas; sources have different strengths. No single source or expert is authoritative and reliable on every topic. Build the habit of looking at a variety of sources and thinking about whether the strengths of that source are relevant to your research question.
• Avoid taking what a source says about itself at face value. Always seek external confirmation of its claims and purpose. Some sources exist to mislead readers, or have a context that has changed since they were first created, and seeking outside information is the most reliable way to identify those circumstances. 

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.

Search filters are criteria which can be used to limit results from a given search; faceted navigation is the dynamic interplay of such filters as it is implemented on a given platform. 

You can often filter for scholary and/or peer-reviewed resources; below are examples from some of our most popular search platforms;

• In Summon, under the Refine your search filter, you can limit results to Scholarly & Peer-Reviewed, or even just Peer-Reviewed;
• In Databases A-Z, you can use the Type filter to limit database listings to those which prominently feature Scholarly & Peer-Review [sic] resources;
• In EBSCOhost databases (e.g., Academic Search Complete), under the Limit your results filter, you can limit to Peer Reviewed resources;
• In ProQuest databases, under the Limit to filter, you can limit to Peer reviewed results; under the Source Type filter, you can limit to Scholarly Journals.

When you have identified a resource of interest, but aren't sure if it falls under the category of scholarly or peer-reviewed, you have recourse to a couple of simple strategies:

• For any resource, search for the title as an exact phrase (enclosed in quotation marks) in Summon; then, under the Refine your search filter, limit results to Scholarly & Peer-Reviewed, or even just Peer-Reviewed. Does the resource persist in the results list?
• For articles from a serial publication (journal, magazine, etc.), visit our Journal Finder, and search for the publication by title; if the resource is peer-reviewed, the label Peer Reviewed will appear prominently in the listing, along with an icon depicting a square academic cap and tassel.

Find the Journal Finder on our website under:
Research Tools > Search Tools > Journal Finder

When you are viewing a resource listing, it can be very useful to look for other relevant resources among:

• cited references (other works cited in this resource); and 
• citing references (other works that cite this resource)

The platforms Web of Science and Google Scholar have enhanced cited-reference search functionality.
Note: Web of Science indexes plenty of arts and humanities content at this point, so it’s a good option for almost any subject!

Records in either database will include browsable citing references (Cited by in Google Scholar; Citations in Web of Science).
Note: Counts in Google Scholar will tend to be higher; Google Scholar tends to index resources regardless of access, whereas Web of Science prioritizes those resources for which it is able to provide a complete citation, or better yet, an abstract.

Web of Science will generate a hyperlinked list of Cited References, although it often will not be able to supply a link for all cited references.

In Web of Science, you can perform a cited-reference search by changing the search type from Document to Cited References.