Literature search: 4. Search techniques

Topic : Investigating people's behaviour on social media in South Africa

Keywords: social media, behaviour, South Africa

Search terms:

• social media = social media, viral content, new media, social networking service, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, blog …
• behaviour = behaviour, behavior, functioning, reaction, operation, working, performance…
• South Africa = South Africa, Republic of South Africa, Africa, Johannesburg, Cape Town…

You can combine your search terms with Boolean search operators and use other search technique, too.

("social media" OR facebook) AND (behavio?r) AND "South Africa"

Combining multiple keywords in one search can be done with Boolean operators. Depending on the operator, it broadens or narrows your search results:

AND

All terms must appear in the search results

 OR

One or both of the terms must appear in the search results

 NOT

The term must not appear in the search results

It can be more efficient to nest search terms
using brackets, especially during complex searches. These are used to retrieve a broad set of search results:

A wildcard, # or ? or $ (depending on the
database), can replace none or one letter in spelling variations. Wildcards maximize your search results:

This includes searches for behavior, behaviour.

Breaking off search terms is called truncating. The truncation mark replaces a part of the word in order to search for singular, plural or other endings of the term at the same time. Trunctation broadens your search:

This search includes gene, genes, genetics, generation.

Double quotes around a phrase indicate that the specified search terms must follow each other in this exact order. Use phrase searching on established phrases only. It narrows your search and filters out irrelevant results:

It is possible to search in different fields/index simultaneously such as title words and author name. By doing so, the search results will be fewer but more relevant:

In some databases you can use subject headings to search for literature. Subject headings are terms pre-defined by academics or algorithms. Use these headings to find relevant literature on the same topic.