GEO 5991: Graduate Seminar in Geology (Kulkarni)

Keywords:  what you type is what you get from a database:

• Why:  When it comes to searching for relevant articles on a topic of interest, you cannot type a whole sentence into a search box but a few keywords.
• What:  Keywords – the words that can significantly, best describe your topic of interest.  
• Number of keywords – In order to get the better results -  in terms of relevancy and manageable number of results generated -, always try to control the number of your keywords/concepts for the topic, no more than 3-4 keywords or concepts are preferable.  
• How to combine keywords:
  • To combine keywords in different concepts, using AND
    • evaporation AND water AND cycle AND ground 
  • To combine similar words/synonyms or variation of a word, using OR  
    • evaporation OR vapor OR transpiration 
    • desalination OR desalinization
  • To combine AND with OR
    • (aqueous OR water) AND (desalination OR desalinization)
  • Using a sybmoc called asterisk (*) as truncation character  or wildcards to retrieve variations of the search term
    • Farm* >-  will find: farm, farms, farmer, farming
    • Hydr*  >-  will find: Hydrology OR Hydrogeology OR Hydrogeochemistry OR Hydraulics

Using: AND

• evaporation AND water 
  • may get overwhelming results ... Why?  How to narrow down?
• evaporation AND water AND cycle AND ground 
  • results reduced to 700+
• evaporation AND cycle AND "ground water" 
  • result reduced further - see this link

Using "Quotation Mark" to force a phrase search: 

• "ground water flow" 
• "ground-water flow"  
• "groundwater flow"

Using: OR:

• "ground water flow" OR "ground-water flow" OR "groundwater flow"
• "geographic information systems"  OR GIS
• Note: Using OR - could yield more results, as long as one of them can be found from databases

Put all-in-one: Using Content-related Fields -- Subject field/SU and Title/TI fields --  with combination of using AND, OR so to get the optimal, more precise search results: 

• Search Statement:  TI(evaporation OR vapor OR transpiration) AND su(ground) AND su(water) AND su(flow)
  • Including the following elements:
    • TI(evaporation OR vapor OR transpiration)
    • AND SU(ground)
    • AND SU(water)
    • AND SU(flow)
• Results and Comparison:
  • 60 Results from GeoRef Databases
  • Comparing results: see link -  not limiting to subject and title fields (i.e., without SU and TI)  
    • Results - still overwhelming, soem could be only marginally related due to without using SU and TI

One of Challenges in searching: to find right keywords that can be used towards meaningful results. 

• From your research interest/focus (your interest is your best friend, teacher).
• As a rule of thumb, computer databases prefer specific, concrete terms over wide-ranging, general, generic terms, like: 
  • Engineering, environment, culture, geology ... not so meaningful for search
• General-to-specific approach:
  • Broad terms (limited to subject field)  + Specific words (your research focus)
  • Examples from searching EBSCOhost 
    • hydrogeology  >  Overwhelming results > hydrogeology AND Modeling    
  • More examples:  see the next page entitled "Subject Field Search in Databases" 
• Another search strategy: using the Thesaurus within Specifc databases in order to find out widely-used terms in the research field 
  • Database Water Resources Abstracts (ProQuest)  > top menu > click Thesaurus 
  • Database GeoRef (ProQuest) > Thesaurus >
    • e.g.: type Volcanology > get a long list of available narrower, broader, and related terms > Snowball effect ...
    • which terms are more widely used in research field or a particular database?
      • e.g.: desalination vs desalinization? 
      • Thesaurus will tell: desalinization Use for: desalination
  • Database Engineering Village 2 > tab "Search" > drop dowm menu  > select Thesaurus > 
    • desalination > 10 matching terms: Desalination | Distillation | Osmosis | Salt removal | Seawater | Sodium chloride | Vaporization | Water treatment  | Seawater--Salt removal*  | Water treatment--Salt removal*
    • desalinization > 0 matching terms
  • Moral of the Story: Only the thesaurus in a particular database will tell which one is more widely used (expected in a particular database), if you want to get more precise results from them.

 Add / Reorder