There are different search techniques that I would like to take away with me from this class. First of Boolean operators, because this seems to be important in all different databases. Main Boolean operators are: and, or, not. These help centralize your search and cut out irrelevant sources. Truncation also is important. To truncate is to use an *, to show that any words with the same base can be found in the search. For example if you type in medic*, you will bring up results that include medicine, medical, medicaid, etc. We have also learned about proximity searches, where you can insert an N5 in between your phrase to find words that are within five words of each other. An example of a proximity search would be: ground N5 water. Inserting W8, searches for words that are within 8 words of one another, but what differs from N5 is that with W8 they will only be found in the order of which they were entered, and with N5 the order doesn’t matter. You can switch the numbers to switch the number of words: N7, W4, N14, etc. Wildcard searching is where a ? is entered in place of an unknown letter. The database will fill in that letter, but not exclude that letter’s position. For example ban?, would find bank or bang, but would not pull up ban. Adjacency is when the words are next to each other, but quotations must be used so that stop words aren’t included in an adjacency such as a title, “Dividing up is hard to do.”
