Communication Disorders Library Orientation: Search Strategies

Getting Started with Searching

• Identify the main concepts of your research question:
• A 6 year old with childhood apraxia of speech is motor programming approach or melodic intonation therapy more appropriate?

*Recommendation:  only search for the disorder and one treatment at a time.

• Use search commands to improve your search results:
• Most databases recognize the following commands:
• AND to find articles that contain all words you enter.

apraxia AND childhood AND motor programming

• OR to find articles that contain either word you enter.

childhood OR adolescents

• NOT to find articles that exclude words or terms you don't want.

NOT adults

• Quotation Marks to search for a specific phrase

Example Search:  "motor programming"

• Truncation to broaden your search to include various word endings and spellings by adding an asterisk to the root word.

Example Search:  child* returns child, children, childhood

• PUT IT ALL TOGETHER:

This search string will return articles that mention apraxia, (child, children, childhood), motor programming.  Articles that mention apraxia, adolescents, motor programming will also be returned.

*Note that the command NOT was not used.  If you use NOT the database will not return articles that mention the term.  If you used NOT adult, you will not see any articles that mention the term even if they are potentially useful because they also mention children.

What is the difference between searching Start Your Research versus a subject Database?

• Start Your Research
  • Searches just about everything the library owns
    • Books, Ebooks, Subject Databases (medical, literature, social science etc...), Streaming Video, etc...
  • Your results list will contain a lot of irrelevant sources
• Databases
  • Searches fewer resources such as journals, magazines, and newspapers in a specific discipline like Nursing
  • Your results list will contain more relevant sources

Some ways to find additional articles:

Change your search terms

• Figure out the terms that the database uses for your concepts by seeing the subject headings or MeSH terms found in the article records of relevant results.

• If a database has a thesaurus (Subject Headings, MeSH terms), you can browse it for subject headings, see the scope note or definition of a subject heading, and see related terms that you might use. 

Citations

• Consult the bibliography of relevant articles to find additional sources.

• Check for articles that have cited a relevant article using Google Scholar or the database Web of Science.

If you come across a citation to an article and you'd like to track down its full text, here are a couple of options:

• Start Your Research (SYR)

  When searching for the full text of an article, start by searching the "title of an article" (enclosed in "quotation marks") in SYR.

"qualitative study of determinants of ptsd treatment initiation"

• Periodical List (PL)

   If you're unable to locate the fulltext by searching the article title in SYR, next try searching the "journal title" in the Periodical List, which is a searchable list of print/online journals accessible through the University Libraries.