Research

Searching is the activity of looking thoroughly in order to find something. In library and information science, searching refers to looking through records thoroughly in order to find desired information.

When you search for information online or in library databases, you need to use Academic Search Techniques in order to get the most out of your time and efforts. You should spend your time effectively attempting to search for relevant information for your research topic. With correct search attempts, you will be able to find useful and relevant information more efficiently. For effective search results, you should be familiar with following terms:

Search Engines

Search Engines (e.g. Google) are based on a software program that searches for sites on the World Wide Web using words that the user designate as search terms/keywords. These have 3 parts:First part is a program called a Spider. The Spider collects data on the web and the second part of the search engine is an indexer program, which organizes data into a large database. When we use a search engine we interact with the third part - the search engine software. This software searches the indexed data, pulls out relevant information according to your search.The search results are presented in a list- known as hits (sites that match your search).  

Keywords

When doing a Keyword Search it is better to pick out the main concepts from your research question/topic. Let's imagine that you are doing research on the following topic - " Effective usage marketing innovations in business management". Here - Marketing, Innovation, Business, and Management might be the main concepts for this research question/topic, isn't it?
You can also use synonyms of the keywords: Management = Administration, Leadership, Control, Supervision, Operation, etc.
Sometimes using abbreviations of the words also might be helpful in your research process - B2B = Business to Business, CMS = Content Management Systems, CRM = Customer Relationship Management, SMM = Social Media Marketing, etc.

Boolean Operators

Boolean Operators Boolean Operators are simple words (AND, OR and NOT) used as conjunctions to combine or exclude keywords in a search. These are used to connect and define the relationship between the search terms. Thus, resulting in more focused and productive results.These three terms are widely accepted by the designers of the search engines. They have well defined meaning while used as operators in information search. The three operators of Boolean logic are the logical sum (+) OR, logical product (x) AND, and logical difference (-) NOT. All the information retrieval systems allow the users to express their queries by using these operators. Let us now understand the implications of these three operators.

OR Operator: The OR operator allows the searcher to specify alternatives among the search terms. When a string is created using OR operator, the search engines retrieve all those resources where any of the terms or keywords connected with ‘OR’ exist. For example, if we create a search string like, ‘student OR education’ and search it, then the output of the search will be a list of references of all those resources, available in the system, where either student or education exists.

AND Operator: The AND operator is used to combine two or more terms. When a string is created using AND operator, the search engine retrieves all those resources where all the terms or keyword connected with ‘AND’exist. For example, if we design a search string like, ‘student AND education’and search, then the output of the search will be a list of references of all those resources, where student and education, both the terms exist.

NOT Operator: The NOT operator is used to exclude the term from a set of resources. For example, if we create a search string like ‘student NOT education’ and search, then the result of the search will be a list of references of all those resources, available in the system, where term student exists but not education.

Phrase Searching

Phrase searching helps refine your search by allowing you to look for words together in a phrase, in the order specified. This type of search is supported by most databases. For example, when you search for a phrase like (Customer Relationship Management) the search engine will bring back any results that have those words in them. However, if you put quotation marks around the phrase, "Customer Relationship Management", the search engine will only bring back results that have all those words, exactly in the order, you have them. This can also be useful when you're searching for the title of a book or other resources.  

What are Bibliometrics?

Bibliometrics is the statistical analysis of books, articles, or other publications. The analyses are used to track author or researcher output and impact. This can help in promotion and tenure, as well as aiding in funding and grants. Bibliometrics are also used to calculate journal impact factors, which can help you decide which journal to publish.

Journal metrics measure the performance of research and scholarly publications. You can use journal metrics to compare and rank journals in order to make strategic decisions about the best journal in which to publish your research for maximum impact.  

You can source journal metrics from a number of ranking tools. Each of these tools has its own strengths and limitations and measures different elements of journal metrics. The comparison table below will help you use these tools with discretion to judge the most appropriate publications for your research.

(The University of Adelaide, 2021)