How to search

Keyword searches is one of the most powerful ways of retrieving information. First, however, we will explore a couple of other ways of searching.

Author/title searches

Searching by author and/or title obviously assumes that you are searching for a particular author or book or article title, probably in either a database. Obviously particular search engines will vary, but the following are some general guidelines:

• When searching by author, put the author’s last name first i.e. Kotler, Philip, not Philip Kotler

• When searching by title, it helps if you enter the title as correctly as possible.

• If searching for an organization, give the full name of the organization as it commonly appears, e.g. World Bank.

Snowball search

This is a good way of searching if your topic has a key work or author. Look in that work for the key people on whom that author draws, making a preliminary bibliography from that. Do the same for each of the subsequent authors.

Keyword searches

Keywords are a way of searching through subject/topic. Most library catalogues and databases will include an option to search by keyword and an alternative to author and title. Searching by keyword can be very effective, providing you select terms that accurately describe what you are looking for, and ones that are likely to have been picked by other writers on the subject. In fact, part of the reason why keywords are effective is because writers often pick out their own keywords to describe an article, which means that they come up more easily in a search. Some search tools understand natural language, and automatically try and find as many of your words as possible, but not necessarily in useful relationship to one another.

One way of making your search more specific is by using operators from Boolean logic. This way, you can use terms such as AND, OR, NOT, as well as punctuation such as “ “, ( ), to link words together and make ‘search strings’.

Wildcards

Ways of dealing with different spellings: for example, analyse/analyze can be dealt with by placing a ? or * in the place of the ‘s’/’z’.

Truncations

This allows you to search all the variants of a word by putting a * after its stem. It can be useful in dealing with verbal forms of nouns e.g. analys* for analyse/analysis, but take care that you don’t select a root which also applies to many other words. For example, archiv* for archival/archive research would also yield results that relate to archives generally.

Two final points about using keyword searches in individual databases, library catalogues and search engines: individual databases will have different rules about syntax, operators etc. and you are advised to look at their help pages for guidance. Some databases and search engines structure their search mechanisms around Boolean searching, as for example the ‘Advanced search’ option of Google, or that in Emerald’s Fulltext, which allows you to search a phrase (otherwise “ “) or use and/or etc.

Practical task

Make up a 3-minute report on one of the topics:

• Effective methods of WebSearch

• Databases for scientists

• Reference management software

• Research networks as the sources of information (Google Scholar, Research Gates etc.)

Use the information of the Unit and additional web sources. Share your ideas with the group mates.

Unit 2. Summarizing and evaluating academic sources

Warm-up activity

Discuss in groups of four

1. Do you take all the information for granted?

2. How do you evaluate information?

3. How do you decide whether the information is accurate?

4. Have you ever evaluated any academic paper? If yes, tell us in details.

5. What problems do we face while evaluating any scientific resource or article?

6. What should we do in order to decide whether it is appropriate to refer to or not?

7. How do you understand the phenomenon ‘plagiarism’?

Active vocabulary

Learn the active vocabulary of the lesson

№	English	Russian
1	academic, scholarly	научный, университетский, академический,
2	access to journal (periodical) titles	доступ к периодическим изданиям
3	to acknowledge	признавать, допускать, подтверждать
4	to apply evaluation measures	использовать средства оценки (информации)
5	to assume a high level	воспринять, понять, принять высокий уровень чего-либо
6	avenue of the research	способ исследования
7	to be overwhelmed with smth	быть переполненным чем-то
8	bedrock of the discipline	основные принципы, факты предмета
9	books of edited readings	хрестоматии
10	carry little weight	играть незначительную роль
11	clues to search for smth	подсказки, информация по поиску чего-либо
12	credibility	надежность, эффективность, достоверность
13	critical judgement	осмысленное суждение
14	customary navigation aid	широко используемое средство поиска
15	evaluate	оценивать
16	full text article	полнотекстовая статья
17	academic audience	ученые, преподаватели
18	handful	небольшое количество, группа
19	mind mapping	ментальные карты
20	panel of peers	экспертная комиссия
21	peer reviewed, refereed	реферируемый
22	relevant	релевантный, соответствующей (тематике)
23	reliability of the information	надежность информации
24	rigor	строгость, соответствие
25	scope	содержание, объем
26	to sift	тщательно рассмотреть (факты), анализировать
27	to summarize	резюмировать, подводить итог
28	table of contents	содержание, оглавление
29	to take notes	учитывать, записывать, делать записи
30	transgression	ошибка, проступок
31	validity	обоснованность, верность, надежность
32	vested professional interest	персональный, собственный интерес
33	worthy contribution to smth	существенный вклад во что-то