Near Eastern Studies: Quick Links for Graduate Students: Researching

TIP:

Almost all catalogs and databases have a single search box called "easy" or "quick" or "Siimple Search" and another option called "Advanced Search" which has three boxes and lots of other options.

Often the options of the "Advanced Search" will prompt you to design a more efficient and fruitful search.

TIPS:

Phrase searching
Almost all library catalogs and databases allow the use of quotation marks which keeps the words together as a phrase. Example "The Oxford Classical Dictionary."  Searching by this phrase results in fewer hits and better than searching on those words separately.

Truncation
Another incredibly powerful feature is truncation which allows a system to search for variants of a word. Example: laugh* means the system will search for laugh, laughs, laughing, laughter, etc.

TIP:

keywords = more hits & sometimes worse

subject words = less hits & better 

keyword = the word is found anywhere in the item--title, author, abstract, summary, notes, description, publisher, and sometimes full text when it's available

subject words = library catalogs use Library of Congress terminology; most databases have their own terms, sometimes called descriptors, which are often similar but not exactly same as library catalogs.

A good rule of thumb is to pay attention to the subject words in your results and use them to refine your search strategy.