Basic Searching
By Ismael K. Isikel 17/02/2015
Matheson Library
Papua New Guinea University of Technology
This search guide is for the students of the Papua New Guinea University of Technology in Papua New Guinea. It is intended for the students to maximize their success in searching and retrieval of information.
Basic Approach to Online Searching for Information
You can search by Author, Title, and Subject if you know any of these or by guess work. You simply type in any of theses on the search prompt slot in your laptop or mobile and you will receive a search result that you go through and select those items that are suitable for your purpose.
Before Searching
Before starting your online search you break your topic down into terms or phrases so you can use these to search for information. This is known as analyzing the topic. For example, your instructor gives your class this topic "Social Impact of Experimental Seabed Mining in Papua New Guinea" to write an essay on. You break this topic down into words or phrases.
Example
Topic: "Social Impact of Experimental Seabed Mining in Papua New Guinea"
Words and Phrases: Social impact, Mining, Seabed, Seabed Mining, Experimental Seabed Mining, Papua New Guinea.
The words and phrases are taken directly from your topic. It does not mean that these are the only words and phrases. There are others that you may recall from previous readings and discussions in the community including the social media. Experimental seabed mining is a topic that is currently being discussed in the media and other sources and terms such as Nautilus, Solwara 1, Bismarck Archipelago, and names of countries involved in the subject should come to mind. Add these to your Words and Phrases and your list may look like the one here.
Words and Phrases: Social impact, Mining, Seabed, Seabed Mining, Experimental Seabed Mining, Papua New Guinea,,Nautilus, Solwara 1, Bismarck Archipelago.
Searching
After you have broken down your topic into words and phrases you may then proceed to search using each word one at a time or string them together using the Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT. Advanced Search uses the Boolean operators. In an OPAC you may not be required to actually write out the search phrase using the Boolean operators because there is a prompt slot available that only requires you to fill in the terms.
When i typed in Experimental seabed mining, for example, doing a Google search it came up with about 254,0000 results in 0.38 seconds. The first item that appeared on the list is this:
Scholarly articles for Experimental seabed mining | |
… impacts of deep seabed mining on abyssal benthic … - Trueblood - Cited by 23
… and its implications on deep seabed mining - Sharma - Cited by 33
… of environmental impacts of deep seabed mining - L. Morgan, Nii Allotey … - Cited by 22
| |
Note the phrase "impacts of deep seabed mining" in the first item above. That is one phrase i did not think about to include in my search words. Therefore, each time you get a search result read carefully for other terms that you may use if the search result does not give you any relevant items to read for your paper. However, the good thing about search engines is that they retrieve other items with related terms to your search word.
