Grant Hardaway: Hello, my name is Grant Hardaway.
I'm the librarian for the sciences here at
Trinity and today I'm going to talk about
the advanced search tool through the Library
One Search. So, this is available through
lib.trinity.edu. If you watched my previous
video on just the basic searching, you saw
that I did a simple search on climate change.
So, I'm going to do that again but I'm going
to change some features of the search. I'm
going to go ahead and search for climate change.
Then, we're getting the same results, so we're
getting almost two million results, which
is a lot, and climate change also is a pretty
broad topic. So, depending upon what you're
writing your paper about, you probably want
to get more specific than just generally climate
change. So, I'll show you how you can make
this search more limited and how you can make
it just more precise. So, I'm going to click
on this advanced search option here. Now,
you can already tell that there are some differences
between just a basic search and an advanced
search. So, you have additional areas where
you can enter in search queries, so, for instance,
let's say we want to write about climate change
but specifically we want to talk about renewable
energy. If I go ahead and type in “renewable
energy” here, you could just type that in.
You could also type in just “or” here
and it'll give you some alternate ways to
say “renewable energy,” and this is generally
for most topics if you type in “or,” they’ll
give you other ways to say it. So, if an article
references “renewable energy,” whether
you call it “green energy” or “alternative
energy,” you'd be able to find those articles
as well. So, I'm going to go ahead and click
on this option here, then if you scroll down,
you can actually limit by discipline. So,
one thing about One Search is that it looks
at a topic from all different types of disciplines,
so if you're looking at climate change, for
instance, you may not want to look at climate
change from a biology perspective. Perhaps
in this paper, you're really just looking
from an economics and political perspective.
If that's the case, you may want to go ahead
and limit it by those disciplines right away.
So, for instance, I can click on “economics,”
“political science,” and “politics and
government.” So, I know that when the articles
pop up, I'll be able to see articles within
that realm and I won't have to kind of parse
through elements of history or even anthropology
with climate change. I can really focus on
the topics that I'm interested in. So, I'll
go ahead and limit it by these three, then
from there, a couple things you can do here.
I'm going to go ahead and limit it by the
peer-reviewed journals, just meaning that
these articles that I do find through this
are up to the standard of that field, meaning
that a group of scholars have reviewed the
article before it was published, which is
generally just a nice mark of quality. If
it's not peer-reviewed that doesn't necessarily
mean that it's a bad article, but in this
case, in a lot of classes, they ask for peer-reviewed
journals. So, this is an easy way to kind
of make sure that you're getting those without
individually looking at each journal that
you're looking at and trying to figure out
if it's peer-reviewed or not, this can automatically
limit to that. You can also limit to full
text. My one reservation on that is that you
would limit away articles that we may not
have access to, but you could get through
interlibrary loan. So, you're going to get
a limited number of articles through full
text, whereas you may find an article you
really like that we don't have access to,
but you could send a request through interlibrary
loan. So, it's up to you. If you need the
article today, for instance, maybe go ahead
and limit by full text, but if you're working
on a project fairly early, you have a few
days you could wait for interlibrary loan,
I would wait to click on full text. Then,
from there, you could go into really specific
search criteria like the specific journal
name, the author, the title of the article.
You could look at what is included within
the article as the image quick view, so this
means images that are attached to the article
that are accessible through One Search. So,
this is really, really limiting, like if you
want an article with a map on it, you can
click on it this way, though once again that
limits it just to the ones that are available
in One Search. If it's not available directly
through One Search, you're going to be limiting
yourself maybe too much. So, the one I would
probably recommend the most, especially with
a topic like this, with climate change, where
the science is constantly updating, you may
want to limit it to the last ten or five years.
So, I'm going to go ahead and do that and
just do the last five years here.
Then you can also limit it by language. I'm going
to go ahead and skip that section, but you'll
probably want to, if you're looking just for
English articles, which may not be the case,
you can limit it that way. So, I'm going to
go ahead and search. Okay, so the results
are much smaller. We have almost about 9,000,
which is still a lot. We can still limit it
some more, but this is a much more manageable
number. So, you'll start looking at the first
couple of article titles here, and you'll
notice that, okay, this could probably be
interesting to me. It seems like it'd be fairly
relevant to your project if you're working
on a climate change paper that looks at renewable
energy from an economic and political standpoint.
If you look at the journal title, so you could
actually see here on the “by” section,
it'll talk about the journal title, Environmental
Politics, so you can tell, okay, this journal
is something that would be interesting to
me. Which is always a good rule of thumb when
you're looking at these articles, to make
sure the journal itself is talking about something
you'd be interested in, and they're looking
at it from a perspective that you’d be interested
in. So, Environmental Politics, that seems
like a journal that would be very, very relevant
to you. If it seemed like it was a bit more
of, say, an anthropology journal, for instance,
it may or may not be relevant to you. It really
kind of depends on your needs in your research.
And that's why limiting by disciplines can
be really helpful in this early stage, because
it can kind of take out those. You'll also
notice that these articles have subject fields,
and so these are all potential search terms
that you could use. So, say, for instance,
you've done kind of a general search and you're
not really quite certain what kind of search
you want to continue doing, using subject
fields is a great way to generate these search
terms. So, say this is an article that you
really like, you can kind of look through
these subject terms and see if there is, perhaps,
a topic that also would be interesting for
your paper. So, for instance, ecological modernization
may be a topic that would be interesting to
you. So, if you want to, you can actually,
I would just copy this, paste it in here,
and then you can select “subject terms”
as a field, so it limits to articles that
only use ecological modernization in the subject
field. So, this really, really will limit
your search results because maybe there won't
be that many articles that are even talking
about this, but if you're looking at ecological
modernization, this would be a really, really
helpful way to narrow down those results.
So, I'm going to go ahead and search by that.
And yeah, so we only have seven, so this may
be even too small, too limiting, which is
the danger with subject terms. But, if you
are struggling finding articles and you keep
getting a ton of results sometimes searching
by subject terms will be the best. I'm going
to go ahead and go back to our original search
before we went and did the subject terms,
and I'll show you a few other ways you can
limit these search results down. So, if you
scroll down on the left-hand side, you could
continue to limit the search if you want.
If you wanted to go ahead, okay, I need to
use full-text, you'd limit it here. If you
wanted to make the date range smaller or larger,
you can change that here.
You could also change the source type. There are a lot
of other more specific ways to limit the search.
Really, the main one I would focus on here
is the “subject” field here, which is
just another way, instead of copying and pasting
one of the subject terms, they have listed
by most popular within the search results,
the subject terms. So, climate change, renewable
energy sources, environmental sciences, so
you may want to limit just to ones that have
climate change in the subject field.
You could limit it
by language, so if you wanted just English
articles you could do that. So, those are
ways that you can limit your search, make
it more precise, and find the articles that
you need. I think getting really small results,
isn't necessarily the aim. The aim is to
get more precise results, and so don't be
intimidated, overwhelmed, or think that you
did something wrong if you're still getting
thousands upon thousands of results. Really
kind of start looking through what you're
finding, and when you do find articles that
are helpful, do things like make note of the
subject terms that are available, make note
of the journals that are available. These
are just many different ways you can make
your search more precise and more effective,
and will make your research process that much
better. Thank you for your time, and best
of luck on your research.
