Literature search techniques: How to find journal articles

Handy hints before you begin

If you have read the hints on a previous occasion and want to skip this page, click the arrow button:

What is a database?

In the following pages I'll show you how to use a database (often called a bibliographic database) to find journal articles on a topic. A database is a computerised index to journal articles, chapters in books and other sources of information such as conference papers. The Library Catalogue will only tell you the titles of journals held by, or that we can access from, the University of Adelaide Library. A database will index each individual article from an extensive range of journals.
Databases cover journals world wide. No library will contain or have access to all the articles indexed. That means that you will need to check the results of your search to see if the articles you have identified as relevant are available in the University of Adelaide Library.

I'll use the Philosopher's Index database as an example. This is the most useful database you can use for philosophy research. The techniques I'll describe can be applied pretty easily to other bibliographic databases.

How the literature search techniques pages work

I've put together a series of linked images of web pages showing the whole process step by step. Simply click anywhere on an image, or on a green arrow button, to go to the next step in the search sequence.

Bear in mind that the results of looking up a topic in a database won't be the same every time: the indexing process is continuous and new articles are constantly being added. The screens that you see in my demonstration won't necessarily be what you'll get if you repeat my search example in the actual Philosopher's Index database.

Defining your topic

One of the traps of database searching is that you can be easily seduced by the apparent ease with which you get results; my primary concern in these literature search techniques pages is to make sure you get the best possible results. This will involve you in a little preliminary effort: I'll show you how to accurately define your topic and then construct a search strategy that will find all relevant journal articles.

Keywords

The first thing to do to define your topic is to write it out exactly, in simple English. It might pay you to look at a dictionary to clarify in your own mind the precise meaning of the topic and/or individual words.
The next step is to underline the significant words in the sentence that defines your topic.
Here's an example:

The underlined words are known as keywords and are the ones you will enter into the database search boxes. Please note that the words study and views are NOT significant words - they won't in any way improve your search results.

Simplistic search

If you simply take the keywords you have identified, and enter them into a database, you will probably get some results. But this simplistic search certainly won't give you all the relevant articles on your topic that are available in the database.
A simplistic search on the keywords from your topic would look like this:

and would produce some results:

But you are not doing yourself (or the database) justice! Let's see how we can improve our search strategy to get much better results.

Refine and broaden your search

Thesaurus

For each underlined keyword, think of other words that mean the same thing (called 'synonyms'), or that are similar in meaning. We can use these words to widen our search.
The best way to do find words that mean the same thing is to use a reference work called a thesaurus. I like to use The new Oxford thesaurus of English and there are other useful thesauri, for example, The Philosopher's Index thesaurus.

If you look up the first keyword, globalization, in a thesaurus you'll find an entry that lists some other similar words such as: world. If you add extra words to your search strategy you will broaden your search and you will retrieve more results.

Next, look up the word ethics in the thesaurus where you'll find an entry that lists similar or related words such as morals. Again, any related words should be added to our search to broaden it, so that we retrieve more results.

Here is how a search using thesaurus terms might be constructed:

This expanded search will find more articles on your topic in the database:

But wait! there are other ways you can refine your search strategy to make it more effective; let's look at truncation.

Truncation and wild card searching

Keywords may have variant endings - singular, plural and adjectival forms. Truncating a word can widen your search by looking for the root of the word plus its suffixes. If, for example, we replace the word globalization with the truncated form global*, the database will find not only records containing the word globalization, but will also search for the alternative spelling globalisation, and will aslo find the root word global.
You should apply a similar technique to the search word ethics. If we use the truncated form ethic* as a search word we'll be searching for the words ethic, ethics, ethical, and so on. Same goes for morals: use the truncated form moral* and the database will search for moral, morality, morals, moralism, moralistic, etc.

You'll find that by truncating your keywords you will expand your search, so you'll find articles that you would otherwise have missed.

Be careful not to go too far with truncation: think of the logical root of the word. If you search for cat* the database will find records containing the words cat, cats, catalogue, cataclysm, catamaran, catastrophe, catch, cataract, and so on.

Philosopher's Index uses an asterisk * for truncation and wild card searching; different databases might use other symbols such as a question mark ?, the hash # or even a dollar sign $. Make sure you know what the truncation symbol is for the database you are using.

Here is how a search might look using thesaurus terms and applying truncation where appropriate:

This further expanded search will find even more articles on your topic in the database:

A bit about Boole

The search we have constructed above is using what are known as Boolean operators to find articles on your topic. There is no need to be afraid of this idea: simply put, Boolean operators link your concepts and keywords together in a precise way, so that the database understands exactly what you are asking it to retrieve.

Let's look at the two main operators, OR and AND:

• OR: If I ask for globalization OR world the database will find all records that contain the word globalization and all records that contain the word world, as well as all records that contain both the words. Using the Boolean operator OR widens your search.



• AND: Narrows your search by combining words. The results found must contain all the words which you have joined by using AND.

There are other operators; one of them is NOT that you can use to exclude a term. My advice is don't use it unless you know exactly what you are doing: it's very easy to throw out the babies with the bathwater by an injudicious use of Boolean NOT.

In our example:

we have constructed a typical Boolean search. [Note: to keep things simple at this stage, I have not used the truncated forms (global*, ethic*, and moral*) of the search terms].

Looking carefully at this search, we are asking the database to do several things:

1. Using the Boolean OR operator, find all records that contain either of the words globalization or world, or that contain both words



2. Using the Boolean OR operator, find all records that contain either of the words ethics or morals, or that contain both words



3. Using the Boolean OR operator, find all records that contain the word singer

Next we apply the Boolean AND operator to narrow our results:

4. Using the Boolean AND operator, find all records that contain either of the words globalization or world, or both words, and that also contain either of the words ethics or morals, or both words

The final step is to ask the database to combine search results [3] and [4], again using Boolean operator AND. This will produce a results list of articles on your exact topic.

You might be able to follow this better if I draw you some diagrams:

Marking records

When you are going through the records that the database has found as a result of your search, you can identify the ones that you think might be relevant to your topic by clicking in the Add to folder box below the record.

When you have finished going through your search results click on Folder View to bring up a screen showing all the records you identified as relevant to your topic.

The Folder List of your journal article references can be printed, e-mailed, saved as a file or exported. This provides you with a handy list of journal articles to follow up, complete with the full references that you can use in your bibliography.

Let's find some articles !

Now it's time to start learning how to do a literature search for journal articles. The structure is a series of linked images of web pages showing the whole process step by step. Simply click anywhere on an image, or on a green arrow button, to go to the next step in the search sequence.

Click the arrow to begin