You can find an appropriate database in a couple of ways. First, you can check out the Research Guide most suited to the research you are doing or, you can check out the Dalhousie Libraries’ A-Z list of databases
Children | Television |
Child Children Toddler |
Television TV |
Many databases have a list of index terms. This list goes by a variety of names such as the thesaurus, subject headings, MeSH terms, etc. These index terms are controlled vocabulary that the database uses to describe different topics. When you find a relevant article, you can often click on it to find out what index terms or subject headings the database is using. This is a great way to think of more keywords, which will increase the likelihood of finding more articles relevant to your topic.
The Boolean Operators AND, OR, and NOT can be used to expand or narrow the focus of your search.
Like in a math equation, parentheses tell a database to prioritize the terms inside the parentheses before moving to the terms outside. For example, if you are searching for articles about children and television you could try:
(child OR children OR toddler) AND television
This search would look for articles including any of the words child, children, or toddler, but only if they also include the term television.
Here are some tricks that you can use along with Boolean Operators to help empower and focus your database searches:
Phrase Searching (“”) When you are looking for a specific phrase, you can place the words in quotation marks to tell the database that you want the terms searched together.
Ex. “foreign affairs” = foreign affairs not just “foreign” or “affairs”
Wild cards (# or ?) are useful for telling the database that you aren’t sure how a word should be spelled.
# is used to indicate that a character may or may not be present in the term.
? is used to show that the correct term could contain a variable character in that position.
Ex. Colo#r = (color or colour) and neutrali?e = (neutralize or neutralise)
Truncation (*) can be used to tell a database to search for all words that begin with the shortened term you entered. Truncating a search term tells the database to search for all terms that begin with the truncated term.
Ex. child* = (child, children, or childhood)
All database platforms have a help feature. The help feature can answer a variety of questions regarding how to use the database and how to search it more effectively.
Need help with 'how to use a database?' Check out these Online Tutorials. These instructional videos cover many different topics relating to research and many are less than 2 minutes long.