When you're doing academic research you often end up using the databases that
are available through your institution's library. In this video I just want to
give you a few tips and examples of how you can search those databases
effectively. In this example we'll use the MLA database, but you should be able
to take these ideas and transpose them and apply them to different databases as
well. When I search a database, one of the first things I like to do is to
just do a very general search first and that way I can kind of see what's out
there, and then we can start refining it. So let's say that we're working on
William Shakespeare and we're dealing with the play Much Ado About Nothing ...
I'm going to put the title in here and then I'm going to
put quotation marks around it. What that does is it's going to search for
the entire phrase rather than the disconnected words. Okay, so we have a
couple of things here -- let's just do a quick search and let's see what comes up.
[We have] 462 results, so that's quite a lot, and we probably want to refine this further.
Let's go back then to our search. We'll do an advanced search here and now we're
going to do a little bit of refining. One thing you can do is you can select
different fields, and there are lots of options here but one that's quite useful
is if you click on a subject. So if we scroll down we click on "subject," and
you'll see in a minute what that's actually going to search. You can also
search for the phrase in the title, if you really want to refine it, or in
different things as well. Underneath here you have lots of different options, so
for instance if we want to search just for a particular date range we could do
that. Let's search for 1990 to 2018. Now let's just click 2018. We can change
what publication type we want. The period is maybe not as relevant. That's when the
article or the the book was written. You can click on full text, and full text is
great if you're procrastinating and at the last minute you only want things
that you can access right away. But do be aware that when you
search these kinds of databases they often don't have the full-text of
everything. They are simply indexing the different
things that are out there, and just because the database doesn't have the
full-text doesn't mean that you can get it through your library. So I wouldn't
necessarily click on full-text, but will do this here just as an example. Okay, and
let's do a search, and there we go! Now we just have 32 results, so we've been able
to really narrow it down, and you can see that in the subjects area here these are
like keywords basically. You can see that much ado about nothing shows up and
that's why it helped to put the subject as a field. Alright, let's go
back again, and we're going to do a slightly different search. Let's say that
we have a few key terms that we want to use. So we have a few key terms and maybe
on the topic sheet from your instructor for your essay you notice some of these
terms. Well, you probably want to put them in. Maybe you're writing an essay
about comedy, so there we go, and notice that it gives you some
suggestions here. So what this does by -- putting "or" here in between these
suggestions t's going to treat them as synonyms. It's basically saying
we're going to search for all of these terms and, if one isn't in there, if
the other one is it's still going to show up. This is a little bit different than
if you use for instance these other options here. You can also use these --
these are called boolean operators ... basically they allow you to exclude
things. They allow you to create choice. The results will be a little bit
different if you use this kind of "or" as opposed to the "or" within a search
box. Alright, so we have these different options now, and let's just do the
search first of all. Let's see what comes up. Okay, 327 results so that's still
quite a bit. Notice that when you look at the subjects area, the word "comedy" keeps
coming up here. You can see that. Both of these first two results have the
word "comedy." And what's happening here I think is that because the play is a
comedy as a genre, this term is going to come up all the time, even if the article
isn't really about humor. What we might want to do, then, is simply take this term
out and we're also just going to add a different spelling of "humor" here,
although I don't think it'll make a difference in this example. But do be
aware of spelling. So we're going to change this up a little bit, and now if we
search again ... let's see here ... now we have just five results. That really limited
it, and we can see the difference then between these searches. As we scroll down
here you'll notice that there's an article on Dogberry -- that's one of the
characters in the play and Dogberry is a very funny character. So when
we look at these different titles and these different subject areas, we should
see them as inspiration for future searches. We could, for instance, just do a
search for Dogberry and see what that brings up, and now we have eight results,
so slightly different results, but searching is all about just fooling
around with the search terms. It's trial and error, and eventually you tend to
find what you're looking for. Okay, let's do another search this time, and we're
going to get some different results here. I'm going to search for Hamlet. I'm just going to
reset this to any field, and in this case we're going to add a different search term
here (feminism) but I'm not going to finish it. I'm going to add this asterisk here, and
this is what's called truncation, which is where it's going to look now for all of
these different endings: feminism, feminist, femininity. I'm leaving the
last bit open in terms of how it's going to finish this word. So that's
a really cool feature. Let's see what comes up: 61 results. Now, let's
actually try this "not" boolean operator, and we're going to add Ophelia here,
who is one of the characters. Not sure why you'd want to exclude her from your
search, but let's pretend that you do. And we can do this [search] again. Now it's only 37,
and so we have excluded a bunch of results. I'm going to leave you with
a couple of final tips as you do these searches. One of the cool things you can
do is if you click, for instance, on this particular source, you can actually
search within a specific journal. So you find the journal, you click on it, and
then it's going to bring this up in your text box. Notice that you could also just
type it in yourself: JN with quotation marks around the journal title. And then
you can search within all the issues of this journal. So we can look for Hamlet,
and what we're going to see now is that there are 29 results in terms of
articles that are specifically from this journal on this topic. Last thing I'll
mention is if you click on the source itself
you have a whole bunch of options. My library provides a "where can I find this?"
link, so even if there's no PDF of it, or no way to read it on the screen, I may
still be able to get it through the library. And then on the right side I
have other options as well. The most important one here is "cite." What that
does is it gives you a whole bunch of citation options here, so you can just
copy and paste these into your essay. And then you do have to do a little bit of
formatting, because they're not necessarily perfectly formatted. One of
the key things to watch out for is that you tend to have straight quotation
marks instead of those beautiful curved quotation marks. Okay, that's it for
searching databases effectively. hopefully found this useful!