Library searches

A student may ask us:

Is it possible to make my search more broad?

Sometimes if students try to find information about a detailed subject, they may find little material available. If there are no books and not many articles on a student’s research topic, it can help to broaden the search. Our first question might be:

What is the topic or title of the academic research project or thesis?

The student might tell us:

The Effect of Dietetic Rolled Vanilla Ice Cream Consumption on Early Childhood Obesity in Pom Prap Sattru Phai, Bangkok, Thailand.

The subject is so specific that there may be no studies available about the diet of young children in Pom Prap Sattru Phai, especially not scientific data about one type of dessert preference for small children who might be overweight. The subject of sugarless or dietetic vanilla ice cream may not have been researched fully in the past. If we find little information about these details, we should not feel discouraged. We can suggest to the student:

Try to find equivalent terms for the topics of research.

Instead of searching for dietetic vanilla ice cream, we might try a search for ice cream or just desserts. Instead of searching for Pom Prap Sattru Phai, we might broaden our search to Bangkok, or Thailand. The student may wonder:

Where can I find other keywords that might be useful?

The student should have no trouble thinking of the word dessert instead of searching for the term ice cream, but finding another word for the term dietetic in English may be difficult. Our reply:

One place to look would be in a thesaurus.

The student may not be familiar with that word, so we can add further information:

A thesaurus lists words in groups of synonyms and related concepts.

The noun thesaurus derives from an ancient Greek term meaning storehouse or treasury, so a thesaurus is a treasury of words. A thesaurus organizes words by similar meanings. As we know, dictionaries work differently, since dictionaries list words in alphabetical order. Thesauruses do not list every possible meaning for a word, and sometimes they do not include the words we are looking for. They do not give definitions of words the way that dictionaries do. But they can help us find additional keywords for searches. If we go to the website thesaurus.com and look up the term ice cream, we see that an alternate term is frozen dessert. It may be worth searching for frozen dessert or just dessert instead of dietetic ice cream.

The student may ask us:

How many searches should I do with all these different words?

Our reply might be:

To save time, combine all the words in one search, rather than doing several separate searches.

For example, we may search for

Ice cream OR frozen dessert OR confectionary OR sweets

To find information about a place, we might put into the search engine

Pom Prap Sattru Phai OR Bangkok OR Thailand

for the widest possible range of results.

(all images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)