Faculty Guide to Information Literacy Resources

Students may struggle with the search process when looking for information resources. 

The frame Searching as Strategic Exploration may help students who have questions such as:

• Where can I find appropriate information resources?
• How do I use specialized search language?
• What do I do when there are too many results? Too few? None?

Finding Tools that can be used for searching:

• Forsyth Library catalog
• Specific scholarly databases (e.g. Education Source, CINAHL, PyschArticles, ArtStor)
• Specific web resources (Congress.gov, Pew Research.org)
• Institutional repositories
• Governments repositories
• Archives
• Open access databases

Specialized Search Strategies include:

• Keyword searching
• Boolean Operators
• Subject Headings
• Citation Tracing
• Filtering Results

Keywords

Scholarly databases use keywords when searching- this is different from the phrase searching that Google uses. Keyword searching should only use the most important ideas for the information need.

For the Research Question What are some of the most effective ways of protecting local groundwater from the wastewater produced by fracking?, students may be tempted to type a phrase, like they would when using Google: 

How to keep fracking wastewater from polluting the groundwater?

 A more targeted search in a scholarly database would use keywords such as:

• groundwater
• wastewater
• fracking

A more advanced form of using keywords is subject headings. These are agreed-upon words and phrases an institution or database uses to assign topics to information resources. The most widely-known subject headings are used at the Library of Congress, but databases may have their own form of controlled vocabulary. Most databases will have the option to search subject headings for this vocabulary.

• Library of Congress: Hydraulic fracking
• Academic Search Premier: Fracking wastewater disposal

Refining Results

Boolean Operators: The most common way to refine a search into more narrow or broader terms is to use the Boolean Operators AND, OR, and NOT to combine additional keywords- even if those words are not part of the research question.

Truncation and Wildcards can also be used, depending on the database. These help find related words with slightly different endings or spellings, for example, frack* will find results with frack, fracking, fracks, fracked, etc. 

• groundwater OR aquifer
• wastewater OR pollution
• frack* OR "oil extraction"
• (groundwater OR aquifer) AND "fracking wastewater disposal" 

Filters

Search results can be refined by applying filters. These vary between catalogs and databases, but common filter options include:

• resource type (book, article, case study, review, media, etc)
• peer-reviewed or scholarly sources
• publication year
• subject 
• publisher
• language
• qualitative or quantitative
• audience

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