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Created with Fabric.js 1.4.5 Ten Essential Information Retrieval Tools This infographic contains essential search tools for new MLIS students in the Dominican University GSLIS program. These tools are both free and password protected, and search scholarly resources, the web at large, social media, online web traffic, health and business information, and more. See below for introductions to their collections and important search tips. Enjoy! KEY Password Protected - Access through Crown Library! Free Online! Humanities Sciences Social Sciences Health Music/Audio Scholarly Material Web Traffic Data Business Social Media Data Video Software Web Pages See at a glance what a resource is best for! The site operator, site: allows you to search only the pages of a particular site. For example, including site:nytimes.com restricts the search to pages on the New York Times website. Putting the operator “~” before a word will search related words. For example, searching “~university will also search for college. Putting terms in quotation marks will search for that particular phrase, rather than the words it contains individually. Putting a minus sign before a search excludes that term from the search. For example, searching for bird -ostrich will return sites containing the word bird, but not ostrich.The operator filetype: allows you to search for a specific kind of file. For example, if you want a pdf copy of an article instead of its HTML version, try searching for the title and filetype:pdf. The operator intitle: allows you to search for a particular word in the title of a document. For example, searching for intitle:geography will return pages with geography in the title. 2. GOOGLE SCHOLAR More specific than Google, Google Scholar searches scholarly literature across disciplines and sources. You can find abstracts, articles, theses, books, and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities, and other places on the web. The resource itself is free, but the articles it links to may be password protected. Using Google Scholar in tandem with other databases at Dominican (like ProQuest, Web of Science, and JSTOR) helps users first find, then access locked resources. TIPS 1. GOOGLE TIPS Click the drop down arrow in the search box to use advanced search features and make your search more specific. You can search by title, author, phrase, restrict your search by date, and use Boolean operators (and, or, not). Once your search results appear, you can search for similar resources by clicking Related Articles under your article of choice.The column on the left side of your search results also offers ways to narrow your search, such as by date or how the results are sorted. 3. PROQUEST Google is an ubiquitous search engine, used by many people to search a vast array of sites and pages on the internet. However, Google is not often utilized to the fullest extent of its powers. Use the tips below to take your Google search skills to the next level. ProQuest offers databases in the arts, business, dissertations and theses, health and medicine, history, literature and language, news and newspapers, science and technology, and social sciences. Dominican offers access to 14 of the databases in ProQuest, but as a GSLIS student, you can access all 90 ProQuest databases for FREE through their Graduate Education Program! Talk to your advisor or this years ProQuest Intern for more details. TIPS Click XX databases in the top bar to limit or expand your search to a particular set of ProQuest databases. You can also click on a subject area, such as The arts or Dissertations and Theses on the main search page to accomplish this. ProQuest also offers an Advanced Search page with more search options. ProQuest does not recognize stop words. While searching some databases for cat in the hat would only return results for cat AND hat, ProQuest searches for cat AND in AND the AND hat.Use “?” as a wildcard to replace a single character in a search (nurse?” will find nurses but not nurse) or * as a truncation character to retrieve variations (*old will find old, bold, and household).Use NEAR/n to look for documents that contain two search terms, in any order, within a specified number of words apart. Replace n with the number you want to use (nursing NEAR/4 practice) 4. WEB OF SCIENCE Dominicans access to Web of Science is composed of three indexes: Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Science Citation Index Expanded. It is the most interdisciplinary and comprehensive citation resource available, extracting citation information from articles in over 10,000 journals. TIPS You can create an account with Web of Science lets you save your search history, create email alerts and RSS feeds, and access your saved search history from any computer at your institution.Use Advanced Search and the Boolean Terms NEAR/x, SAME, NOT, AND, OR (which are processed in that order) to search a variety of fields, including Topic, Title, Author, Publication Name, DOI, Year Published, and Funding Agency. Web of Science provides a list of these codes and others to the right of the Advanced Search field. You can sort your search results a variety of ways, most helpfully by relevance, publication date, and times cited. The left column on the results page also lets you refine your results by things like categories and document type. Narrowing your initial results can be key to finding the material you want. 5. JSTOR TIPS JSTOR is a collection of over 500 major academic research journals spanning the arts, humanities, business, and social sciences. Dominican University provides access to the Arts and Sciences I, II, III, and IV collections. In Basic Search, use quotation marks to search for exact phrases and Boolean operators (AND, OR, and NOT) to construct a better search. Field codes ti: for title and au: for author will also help you search quickly.Use Advanced Search to target your search to more specific disciplines and content. You can use more search fields to construct a more complex search, and use the drop-down boxes provided to limit search terms to title, author, abstract, or caption text fields. The Narrow by options will let you search only articles, include or exclude book reviews, and search for material published in a defined time frame and/or language. You can also focus your search by discipline and title using the checkboxes provided. Sign up for MyJSTOR to save and track citations and set up journal alerts! 6. WORLDCAT TIPS WorldCat is an online database that allows you to search for books, videos, music, articles, and other resources (including digital content!) available through libraries around the world. This database can be used to compare content held by different libraries in different areas, and to connect users wherever they are with local materials. For example, you can use WorldCat to find other copies of books held by Crown Library when you are away from campus. Create a free account to make lists, bibliographies, and reviews of library materials. Browse WorldCat Genres to see dozens of fiction genres, with titles, authors, subjects, characters, and more ranked by popularity. This joint experiment from OCLC Research and WorldCat.org will continue to evolve over time, and hopefully help connect users with new reading material. Use Advanced Search to search by keyword, title, author, accession number, ISBN, ISSN, journal source, or subject. You can other fields to narrow your search by date, audience, content, format, and language. 7. INTERNET ARCHIVE TIPS The Internet Archive is a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form, with the goal of providing permanent access to researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public. The organization is working to prevent the Internet itself and other born-digital materials from disappearing into the past. It is an excellent resource for finding web-born content. Their collection includes web pages, video, text, audio, software, and news broadcast content. Search the Wayback Machine for a websites URL to see archived versions of websites, including sites no longer maintained or in existence. Use Advanced Search to search by Title, Creator, Description, Mediatype, and an impressive array of custom fields. Browsing is a helpful way to familiarize yourself with the layout and contents of the site. The audio collection includes a live music archive, virtual record labels, and more. The video collection contains digital movies of all types, including classic full-length films, alternative news broadcasts, cartoons, and concerts. The software section offers the largest vintage and historical software library in the world! Once you have a better sense of the way the site is organized, searching will be much easier. 8. GOOGLE TRENDS TIPS Google Trends analyzes a percentage of web searches done on Google to figure out how many searches were conducted for the terms entered compared with the total number of Google searches conducted during that time. These searches can be limited to a time period, region, and categories of various levels. Up to five terms can be compared at a time. Google Trends can be used as an alternative metric for ranking, but should be used in conjunction with, rather than instead of, traditional sources. Google Trends rankings are relative, not absolute. When ranking more than five terms, you should find the term with greatest range of rank by interest over time, then measure other terms in relation to it to standardize your results. When searching for terms, Google Trends will suggest specific terms to help you show what you mean. For example, typing Doctor into the search bar gives you options including PhD - Degree and The Doctor - Fictional Character. Choose the one you mean for best results.Narrow your search by location, time period, and category using the drop-down menus below the main search bar. 9. ALEXA TIPS Alexa offers web traffic data and analytics tools that help businesses make data-driven decisions. Website ranking is available at both country-specific andglobal levels. You can also browse top sites overall and by category, like Health or News, in order to find the top-performing sites in a particular area. Enter a URL into the search bar at the top right of the homepage to see its rank, user demographics, and number of sites linking in. More information can be obtained from paid accounts. Alexas rankings are absolute, and dont need to be normalized against each other the way Google Trends results do. Like Google Trends, Alexa can be used as an alternative ranking metric alongside traditional sources. Web traffic can be compared from competing sites to see who is more successful at reaching their audience online over time. Browse top sites by category to find the best-performing sites in a given industry. 10. TOPSY TIPS Topsy is a social media analytics site that looks at data from Twitter. Topsy Search offers top tweets on a given topic, as well as quantifiable data in the form of a sentiment score based on recent tweets. Quotation marks, the OR operator, the site: operator, and the minus sign workthe same way they do in Google search. You can also search for hashtags, tweets send from a person (from:melvillehouse), or tweets referencinga person (“@melvillehouse). The site: “@” and from: operators will show you the Topsy sentiment score for the term being searched at the top of the results. Compare the frequency of up to three terms, sites, or users over the last month using the Social Analytics link in the top tool bar. Click Social Trends in the top tool bar to see top recent tweets. You can refine your search by language using buttons in the lefthand column. QUESTIONS? For more information, please contact librarian Liz Hamilton at hamieliz@my.dom.edu http://www.google.com http://scholar.google.com http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.dom.edu/ http://apps.webofknowledge.com.ezproxy.dom.edu/ http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.dom.edu/ http://www.worldcat.org/ https://archive.org/ http://www.google.com/trends http://www.alexa.com/ http://topsy.com/
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