The language of search

Summer Intensive 2023

Finding things effectively involves making choices about:

• When you search
• Where you search
• How you search

tips for choosing terms

Aim to match the terminology used in the kind of sources that you want to read:

• Scholarly articles, books: terms used by scholars in the discipline(s) you're working in
• Popular: terms used by journalists, by members of the community you're studying
• Primary sources: language used is very different in older historical documents than in recent ones

Proper nouns (individual names, organizations, etc.) often make good search terms since they're used in both scholarly and popular texts. They're commonly used as subjects, too.
 

>> Finding a few sources about an individual can point you to useful search terms for the related topic.

Bender, Emily M., Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell. “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜.” In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 610–23. Virtual Event Canada: ACM, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922.

trust and

transparency

Do blue light-filtering glasses work? (Cochrane Collaborative Systematic Review Protocol)

see appendix (pg. 13) -- we could replicate their exact search

(using a LLM-based chatbot to generate a search strategy)

1. Pick a paper topic. Consider using something you're familiar with, say a paper you already wrote.

2. Compare the output from several different large language model-based chatbots. Ask for peer-reviewed articles about your topic. What are your initial impressions of the results?
   
   - Claude
   - ChatGPT
   - Perplexity
    

3. Prompt the chatbot to format these references in the style of your choice (choose a widely-used academic style like Chicago, MLA, APA, CSE).

4. Use what you know about looking up journals to trace the references. How many of the articles can you find?

Turning questions into keywords

Let's look at this tutorial from
(yup, you guessed it) UCLA WI+RE.

Break down your research interest into its core concepts. Then come up with multiple ways to refer to each concept.

How to find the right search terms for your topic/task

• Do an initial search to gather terminology ideas. What words are being used in titles, abstracts, subjects, keywords, and the full articles/full text?
  
  
   
• Look at sources you already have for ideas: what language do they use?
  If you have a book that's on-topic, look at the index.
  
   
• Browse the subject thesaurus/index in a database that's relevant for your academic discipline

Example: Anthropology Plus

Generating Keywords:
Try out the interactive keyword brainstorm tool from the University of Texas Libraries.

Actually searching

To find sources, you'll need to express your search terms in a way that the database/search engine can understand.

To do this, translate your ideas into statements:

words combined with operators (symbols) that provide clear instructions to the database.

ghost NOT scream
 

ghost AND scream

scream NOT ghost
 

scream OR ghost

Web of Science

19,400

Google Scholar

2,890

Search Operators

hydrofracking OR "hydraulic fracturing"

19,400

Google Scholar

Search Operators:

hydrofracking OR "hydraulic fracturing"

Phrase Search

To search for articles with a specific phrase, enclose it in quotation marks:
"exact phrase"

hydrofracking OR hydraulic fracturing

215,000

19,400

Google Scholar

hydrofracking OR "hydraulic fracturing"

hydrofracking AND "hydraulic fracturing"

14,440

hydrofracking "hydraulic fracturing"

14,440

Search Operators:

OR and AND

To find articles matching either keyword, combine with OR

To find articles matching both, combine with AND  *usually this is automatic

19,400

Google Scholar

hydrofracking OR "hydraulic fracturing"

Combine groups of topics

Work in pairs/groups of 3.

Test out how different search operators work in the databases you reviewed yesterday:

- Which platform(s) are your databases on?

- Can you use the OR operator?

- Does enclosing a phrase in quotes ("like this") give you only results that matching that phrase?

- Can you combine sets of terms using parentheses or multiple search boxes?

Search groups:  (word1 OR word2) AND (word 3 OR word 4)

- NOT

- Proximity - is there a proximity operator?

For example: television n2 violence would find "television violence" or "violence on television," but not "television may be the culprit in recent high school violence."