Literature research
Topic outline
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Boolean operators
Using the Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT), you can link search terms to generate suitable sets of hits.
Boolean operators are database-specific. Please refer to the respective database help page in this regard.
☆ AND, and, [space] (z.B. ZHAW swisscovery, Google)
☆ OR, or
☆ NOT, not, -
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Wildcards
In databases, only those hits that correspond to the exact spelling of your search terms will be shown. But perhaps you would also like to find variants or compound forms of a word? In this case, you can use wildcards for certain character sequences.
Often, the end of the word is abbreviated with an asterisk *. This technique is referred to as truncation or a word stem search.
Example:
resilien* generates hits with the terms resilient, resilience, Resilienz, Resilienzförderung, etc.
Wildcards can also be used to replace just a single letter in a word.
Example:
me?er generates hits for both Meier and Meyer.
Test your knowledge:
When using wildcards, please be aware that the special characters are always database-specific. You can find out more by using the search help function or in tutorials -
Phrase search
In order to identify exact groups of word, i.e. terms comprising two or more words, quotation marks are generally used. The search tool then respects the exact sequence of characters (including spaces) found inside the quotation marks.
Example:
Compare the number of hits generated when searching for climate change policy and "climate change policy" in ZHAW swisscovery.
In most cases, search tools interpret a space between two words as an AND operator and search for occurrences of each term instead of the exact sequence. The quotation marks are therefore necessary for compound words in order to generate the desired results.
In the case of the Ovid search interface (e.g. for Agricola, PsycInfo) a phrase search is automatically conducted upon entering several terms. If you do not want this, you must place an AND between the terms. -
Faceting / Filters
Academic search tools also allow you to subsequently limit your list of hits. Depending on the search tool, different filters including "year", "publication type", "resource type", "language", "topic", etc. are available for this purpose.
These filters can normally be found next to the list of hits.
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Field searches
Many search tools provide the option to only search for search terms in specific fields of the database (often under “advanced search” or “multi-field search”). This can limit the number of results generated so that, for example, only those hits are shown for which a certain term appears in the title. It is also often possible to further narrow down the list of results using so-called faceting.Illustration of a field search in the Web of Science Core Collection database.
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Keyword search
Databases often also have keyword fields. The content of a document is described using keywords.
Specialists look at the respective document and decide which terms most accurately reflect the content. To this end, they use a controlled vocabulary, meaning that terms cannot be chosen arbitrarily. The terms must be taken from a thesaurus (controlled collection of technical terms). Searching in the keyword field is very precise, as a keyword covers the various synonyms of a word in a single term.
