by Jennifer Bromann-Bender, October 2016

Librarians collaborate with teachers, present to classes, teach research skills, and work with students on a daily basis—and yet we may not always reach all of the students with all of the skills they need for success in college research or their future. Or, they may not remember skills you taught them in tenth grade. In a perfect world, all students would know these, but since we don’t live in a perfect world, I thought I’d try to reach my students one last time.

Like a surprise celebrity guest speaker, I decided to offer my services and visit senior classes during the last weeks of school to remind them of the tricks that could lead to more successful search results—whether for a research paper or investigating information for their careers or personal interests. As a post-assessment, we surveyed students to find out if they already knew this information, and whether they frequently used these tips or not. Librarians may be familiar with these strategies, but as you will see in the results, not all seniors were. Seniors remarks included comments such as: 

"Everything was very helpful."

"I literally knew none of this."

"I think the Boolean operators are a great point to make."

Listed below are the tips I shared. Your top ten might be different depending on what you have the opportunity to teach throughout the year. These are the suggestions I have found most useful when working with classes and individual students.

Tip 1: Phrase Searching with Quotation Marks

It doesn’t work for every search engine or database since many combine phrases by default, but it is a good policy to keep words that belong together, together. The example I used with screen shots from an Ebsco search was ILLINOIS CAR SEAT LAWS vs. Illinois “Car Seat” Laws. Without quotations, the top four results yielded were Illinois, Railroads, The Week, and Joe Biden. With quotations around “car seat,” the first results included titles actually about car seat laws. This does not work perfectly for every example.

Tip 2: Citation Search

If there is an article you really think you could use, but it is not available in any database, try a search in a popular search engine for the title. You may want to include the author and acronym pdf after your search. The author name ensures you have the correct article and including pdf ensures that it is not just another citation, but the actual article in many cases. Now this only works about one in ten times for me, but I always give it a try because you never know what you might find.

Tip 3: Add pdf or doc to Your Search

Adding pdf or doc (without the usual preceding dot) to your search will pull up results that mostly contain an actual document. And actual documents are more likely to contain pertinent information than your general searches might produce. So, instead of wasting time clicking on search results to see if an entire article or more scholarly information is included, adding pdf and doc helps eliminate many of the useless results. This is especially useful in Google Scholar.

Tip 4: Add Search Terms to Narrow or Expand Your Topic

There are many terms you can add to a search to get more specific. Besides focusing in on keywords, think of the audience (high school, teenagers, infants, women etc.), place, specific name. For example, if searching for the children of presidents, add the name of a former president’s child to make sure you get the right results. Besides pdf and doc you can also add words like “journal” or "article,” which may eliminate some results, but can often get you closer to what you need.

Tip 5: Find—Ctrl + F Keys Should Be Your Friend!

Don’t skim an entire article or print it just to find out there is only one paragraph related to your topic. Use the Ctrl and F keys (Command + F keys on a Mac) and type in a word or phrase related to your topic. Read the paragraphs around your key phrases or words. The words you searched will be highlighted. Read through those paragraphs to determine if the article is related to your topic and worthy of your time.

Tip 6: The Advanced Search

Even many high school seniors do not realize that search engines such as Google have an advanced search. If you cannot easily find it on the home page, do a search for the advanced search in that particular search engine. You can narrow your search by date, file type, journal, or more options. It doesn’t necessarily filter out everything, but it does help bring more related articles to the top of your results.

Tip 7: Field Search

Many databases include a field search option in the drop down boxes of the advanced search. If not, look for the search engine's help page to find out how to conduct a field search. In Google you would use intitle:word if you wanted to find the word “word” in the title of an article. You might do a field search by author or subject. I always suggest to students that if they have thousands of results, try entering their main keyword in a title search. That way they know the entire article is about that topic. A good example is using a symbol from a novel such as eyes in The Great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald. Searching for eyes in the title field and Great Gatsby in a keyword field, brings about results where the word “eyes” is in the title of the article. Therefore, the student knows that the entire article is about eyes in The Great Gatsby and that eyes are not just mentioned once.

Tip 8: Boolean Search Operators

While “and” is usually a default and not always needed, I like students to get in the habit of using and, or, and not or + and - in searches. A good example is the topic of school uniforms. If you just search for “school uniforms” you might get many hits about online shopping options for purchasing school uniforms. If you put a minus sign before the word “shopping” and after the phrase “school uniforms,” it will eliminate most of the shopping sites. I often tell students if they search for someone like George Bush and keep getting results for a lawyer named George Bush or a band called George Bush, use not or -lawyer or -band or -music and you will eliminate some of the unwanted results. I always say you could create a search that is a paragraph long and save hours of constantly changing your search.   

Tip 9: Keyword Searching

This is often an entire lesson, but can be summed up in a few steps and is a major problem for high school students who just want to type their topic into a search engine verbatim. I suggest that students first brainstorm synonyms, issues, and examples for their topics. Here are some brainstorming ideas for the topic of “Dress Code.” 

• Synonym = school uniform, teenagers, and clothing
• Example = Private vs. public school, specific school implementing/changing/ eliminating dress code, school dances, gang attire/clothing/street clothes/uniform
• Issue = conformity, school rules/behavior/conduct,  freedom of expression, gang affiliation, safety, violence, bullying, cost/money/affordable, equity

Tip 10: Everything Changes

Always check the About or Help section for each database. One week the database may require you to connect words with “and” or “not” and the next week “and” is the default. Continuously try new things and new combinations. In fact, some of this may have already changed by the time you read this article.

These are just some of the many tips you could share. Other possibilities might include truncation, wildcards, proximity searches, order, and simplifying printing. These are all strategies we teach within lessons or when working one-on-one with students, but even if we find out our seniors don’t know everything we thought they were being taught, I send them off with a good reminder before their future research begins.

Survey results