Library catalogue search hints

Which Catalogue option should you use?	To find known books or journal articles, use: Title, Author, Journal or Newspaper Title when you know the title or author of a book or the title, volume and pages of a journal article. Title is the quickest option for known books. Keyword (search engine style) when you have only a rough idea of the author and title of a book. Before searching, know how to identify books, chapters, journal articles in a reading list To find books on a topic, use any of: Keyword (use and, or, not," ") or Guided Keyword Search Subject Heading - likely to give fewer but more relevant results but don't use Keyword (search engine style) which does not offer enough options for good subject searching. To find journal articles on a topic, search databases. To find which items are in the Reserve collection for a course, use Reserve Search. However, to see whether a particular item is in the Reserve collection, search as usual in the Title, Author, etc options.
Title and Journal or Newspaper Title	Type the first words of the title: Omit articles (The, A, An) at the beginning of a title: selfish gene not the selfish gene Try alternative spellings: sulfur, sulphur. To find exam papers, enter the course name or course code and limit to Exam papers.
Author	Enter last name then the first initial: dawkins r Enter organisation name: american chemical society.
Keywords (use AND, OR, NOT," ")	Truncate with ?: mammal? finds mammal, mammals, mammalian. Combine search terms with and, or, not and group terms with brackets: fire and vegetation - both terms present fire or burning - either term present (fire or burning) and vegetation vegetation not grassland - the second term cannot be present Search adjacent words or phrases in quotes: "gene therapy" Search hyphenated words in quotes and also search for the single word spelling:"hand book" or handbook
Guided Keyword Search	An alternative keyword search using menus and drop-down boxes. Truncate terms with ?: mammal? finds mammal, mammals, mamalian. Choose: any of these for a broad search with any term present, all of these for a narrow search with all terms present, or as a phrase. Choose AND, OR, NOT to combine groups of terms. Decide whether to search Keywords or Title or other field.
Subject Heading	Uses standard subject headings. Enter a term and choose from the resulting list of subject headings.
Keyword (search engine style)	A restricted search which finds only books with both words present: enter fire vegetation. Can't search alternative terms. Truncate terms with ?. Use " " for phrases. The relevance sorting of large results is poor: the best matches may not be near the top of the list.
Series Title for Books	Use for a publisher's book series not a journal Type the first words of the series title Leave out inital articles like The, A, An and foreign language equivalents
Limiting searches by date etc	When you enter terms, use Limit or More Limits. Title, Journal Title and Keywords searches can be limited in this way. Or, at the results display screen, use Post limit. All searches can be limited in this way. Limits remain in effect until you remove them.