Comprehensive Searching in the Social Sciences
Subject Guide
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What is Free Text or Keyword Searching?
When you search a database, or even a search engine like Google, most often you will pick out words and phrases directly from your research question or topic without basing them off any index. When we use natural language without consulting a subject index, this is keyword searching. Keyword searching relies on us to supply our search terms and in turn searches every part of an indexed article record unless otherwise specified.
For example, say your research topic is the effect of bullying on minority high school students. Your keywords could be "bullying" and "high school students," and the database would search every indexed field for those words and phrases.
Why Free Text or Keyword Searching?
Subject searching, discussed on the next page, allows us incredible specificity when searching. Keyword searching, however, allows us to broaden our search by including language not used in subject terms. In our example search, the subject in the database might be "Minority high school students," but we could broaden our search with the phrase "diverse high school students." The strength in keyword searching lies in its ability to include synonyms as a way to thoroughly search a topic; different writers, disciplines, and databases can speak of a single concept in vastly different ways, and keyword searches allow us to cover each of those different ways.
Keyword searches allow us to search more than the subject field and broaden our search to the title and abstract fields, for instance, or even the full text if available. This way, if the way we phrase a concept isn't in the subject terms, we still have a good chance of finding what we are looking for.
How to Search by Keyword
- Scopus This link opens in a new windowScopus is a large abstract and citation database of research literature and patents. The database is updated daily; Scopus contains over 93 million records with over 87 million records since 1970. Scopus indexes over 26,000 peer-reviewed journals from more than 7,000 publishers, including over 6,000 open access journals. Scopus also indexes nearly 200 trade publications, nearly 150,000 conferences, and over 300,000 books. Additionally, the database contains over 48 million patent records from US Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO), European Patent Office (EPO), Japan Patent Office, World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), and UK Intellectual Property Office.
Scopus is a research database whose purpose is to index articles from a broad array of disciplines. Therefore, it is a great place for systematic searching.
To do a keyword search in Scopus, type your first keyword or phrase into the Document Search bar, seen above. You can add other keywords or phrases with the AND operator or by clicking the + button to add more rows, allowing you to do more complicated searches. In the above example, we are searching for articles with "bullying" in the title, abstract, or keyword fields AND "minority high school students" OR "diverse high school students" in the same fields.
Most databases use multiple search boxes to build a search for you. However, if desired, you can build your own searches if you know the codes for the search fields. When we use the builder in the first example, the results page will show us what our search string looks like typed out. When you learn the field codes, you can type out these search strings. In the Advanced Search area of Scopus, it gives a list of the field codes, as well.
Hint: Use Boolean operators and nesting in your search strings, as demonstrated in the Search Strategies box on this page.
You can get a sense as to how scholars are describing a topic by looking at the author-supplied keywords in any article:
- Web of Science Core Collection This link opens in a new windowSearch the world's leading scholarly journals, books, and proceedings in the science, social sciences, and arts and humanities and navigate the full citation network. Science Citation Index Expanded (1900 - present), Social Sciences Citation Index (1900 - present), Arts & Humanities Citation Index (1975 - present), Book Citation Indexes (2005-current), Current Chemical Reactions (1985-current, supports structure searches), Conference Proceedings Citation Indexes (1990-current), Emerging Sources Citation Index (2005-current), and Index Chemicus (1993-current).
For published authors of monographs, please submit your request to be added to Web of Science.
Web of Science is a research database whose purpose is to index articles from a broad array of disciplines. Therefore, it is a great place for systematic searching.
To do a keyword search in Web of Science, type your first keyword or phrase into the Basic Search bar, seen above. You can add other keywords or phrases with the AND operator or by clicking the + Add Row button to add more rows, allowing you to do more complicated searches. In the above example, we are searching for articles with "bullying" in all fields AND "minority high school students" OR "diverse high school students" in the same fields. You can get more specific by selecting specific fields, such as just title. However, All Fields means just that: it searches the entirety of a record.
Most databases use multiple search boxes to build a search for you. However, if desired, you can build your own searches if you know the codes for the search fields. When we use the builder in the first example, the results page will show us what our search string looks like typed out. When you learn the field codes, you can type out these search strings. In the Advanced Search area of Web of Science, it gives a list of the field codes, as well.
Hint: Use Boolean operators and nesting in your search strings, as demonstrated in the Search Strategies box on this page.
You can get a sense as to how scholars are describing a topic by looking at the author-supplied keywords on any article:
Search Strategies
Boolean Operators are used to connect and define the relationship between your search terms. When searching electronic databases, you can use Boolean Operators to either broaden or narrow your search results. The three Boolean Operators are AND, OR and NOT.
Boolean Operators
Boolean operators are simple words (AND, OR and NOT) used as conjunctions to combine or exclude keywords in a search, resulting in more focused search results.
OR
- Broadens or expands your search
- Is used to retrieve like terms or synonyms
- Finds all items with either teenager OR adolescent
- In set theory and math, "union" is inclusive "OR".
"OR" = teenager U adolescent
AND
- Narrows or limits your search
- Used to retrieve unrelated terms
- Finds items with both diet and children
- In set theory and math, "intersection" is "AND".
"AND" = diet ∩ children
NOT
- Narrows or limits your search
- Finds the term "spider" not "monkey"
- Use the NOT operator with caution
- May eliminate relevant records
Note:
AND is the default or implied operator in Usearch, Google, Scopus, PubMed, EBSCOhost, and most search interfaces.
"ecotourism sustainable" is the same as "ecotourism AND sustainable"
In Usearch, EBSCOhost, SCOPUS, and PubMed, Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) must be entered in upper case.
Phrase Searching
Phrase searching is using quotations.
For instance:
"international olympic committee"
"Utah tennis"
It finds the exact phrase, and items with words in the order typed. One exception is Scopus. Scopus uses curly brackets or braces for {exact phrase} searching. In Scopus, quotes are used for "loose/approximate phrase" searching.
Truncation Stemming
Truncation or stemming is using an asterisk *. It is also known as a wildcard. Truncation is a symbol that retrieves all the suffixes or endings of a word.
For instance:
school* retrieves school, schools, schooling, schooled, etc.
latin* retrieves latina, latino, latinx, latinos, latinas, latin, latinization, etc.
Note:
In the Library of Congress, % (percent sign) is a single character wildcard and ? (question mark) is truncation for multiple characters.
Nesting
Nesting is commonly used when combining more than one Boolean operator (OR, AND). Most search interfaces search left to right. Using parentheses in a search changes the order of operation.
For instance:
(moral* OR ethic*) AND (assisted suicide OR euthanasia)
(ski OR skis OR skiing OR snowboard*) AND video*
Proximity or Adjacency Operators
Proximity operators allow you to find one word within a certain distance of another.
With (w), Near (n), Next (n), or Pre (p) are common proximity operators.
Note:
Read the database help to see if proximity operators can be used in your searches.
Thanks to Alfred Mowdood for authoring these instructions.
